Greetings from Czech Republic

[MichaelL]

Hello everyone,

It brings me great joy to read all your posts and the exciting progress taking place with Win2008Workstation, but I can’t just sit on the side and observe, so I have decided to get fully involved myself.

Let me tell you about myself and computing habits. I am a Visual Studio developer, developing with MOSS 2007, SQL 2008 etc. I think like most of you guys, I also run Office 2007. These applications as you know are pretty resource intensive, but if thats not all, I am also an avid gamer, and I also from time to time dabble in some graphic design using Adobe products. All this is quite a tall order for my current hardware, which is a Sony Vaio VGN-AR41S (2.2Ghz Core Duo 2,2GB RAM, RAID 0).

Now I need to tell you a sad tale my friends, when I first bought my Sony Vaio Laptop, I was very dissapointed to see that loading XP on it simply was not practical, due to the lack of driver support, for most of the laptops inbuilt hardware, I tried for about 2 months to get everything working, but eventually was forced to return to using Windows Vista. It was at this stage I was seriously considering Linux, but Linux is not all that people make it out to be, for most Visual Studio Developers, Linux is simply not a practical option, but even if you’re an internet browsing Granny, Linux is not anywhere near as easy to use as Windows. In Linux sometimes simple tasks like installing a zip utility requires “hacking” the installation file, so that it works for your particular distribution, in Windows operations like this are a few clicks of the mouse. I would say there is no question Windows is the more mature desktop OS.

I really thought I would be stuck using Windows Vista until Microsoft released something better, then I found you guys, and your site. Actually I read an article on Wikipedia, about this new emerging operating system – called Windows Workstation 2008, lets give it credit for what it is, an operating system in its own right!

I’ve installed and up and running, I followed every single instruction and tweaked all the services and enabled glass and the aero theme, I don’t use the sidebar though. I also installed all my development environment. These are my findings

1…. I had absolutely no problem installing any drivers – I am one of the lucky ones I guess, but all my drivers and devices worked on Win2008Workstation.
2….My system boots and shutdowns quicker than it ever has since I bought it.
3….Visual Studio is a lot more responsive…. Now you might think, yes but you have a clean install, so naturally it will be, actually this is not the case, I have a lot of other utilities that I need for day to day usage, such as rar, daemon tools, graphics packages, office skype, windows live messenger, utorrent, anti-virus, windows live mail – and don’t forget I re-enabled all visual effects for best appearance. Still Visual Studio runs amazingly.
4….Icons appear to draw quicker in explorer views and control panel programs seem to load a bit faster, maybe its just my imagination, but I think others can confirm its true for some reason.

There is just one reason why I have a seperate Vista partition on my drive, I have a TV card, that only seems to work with Windows Media Center, so to record programs I need to log into Vista. I also read you guys are trying to solve this for the community, please don’t give up on this, a lot of people I think would really appreachiate your efforts. I wish you the best of luck on this, unfortunately I am not a server admin, or else I would contribute. But I will ask some people at work, if they have any idea how this can be done.

Thank you all for the hard work up until now, and please continue the good work….
Michael

[Arris]

Hello MichaelL,

Welcome at the Windows 2008 Workstation Forums!

I heard your problem about installing Windows XP on a Windows Vista laptop very often; it’s just the lack of good Windows XP drivers for the hardware. I’m glad you now found this good alternative for you!
The drivers aren’t a big problem for anyone I think: I haven’t heard much people complaining about non-working drivers. In almost all cases just installing the Vista drivers worked fine. I can only confirm the rest of your findings! 😉

I really hope a solution to the Windows Media Center/tv card problem will be found soon; for several people this is a reason to not install Windows Server 2008.

See you around at the Forums! 🙂

[MichaelL]

Thank you for the warm welcome,

I also really hope this problem can be solved with media centre, I won’t even blame the operating system in my case, actually I don’t know what the problem is, but I know I have tried all the good TV apps, and in Native Vista, apps like Sage TV, Beyond, AverTV, Nero Home, MediaPortal, DScalar and the only app that seems to work with the card, is Media Center for Vista. Actually DScalar did manage to render a black and white TV picture for one channel without sound. I have also spent hours/days trying to configure and tune the channels manually, redone all codecs etc.

I have decided that because I am so impressed with Win2008Workstation, I am going to go out and buy an affordable USB 2 TV Tuner, and get around the problem this way. A TV Tuner that is not bound to MCE.

But, and a HUGE but, if any of you guys find a way to get MCE fully operational on Win2008Server, this would be most awesome, and our great OS would really be complete with it.

[michal]

Hi,
From now on there are at least three of us. I have just installed WS 2008 R2 Enterprise and I have to say it’s the best OS from Microsoft.

[Author]

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