Windows Server 2008 is better than Vista, but why? IT infrastructure veteran Mark Wilson asks: It seems that, wherever you look, Windows Server 2008 is almost universally acclaimed. And rightly so - I believe that it is a fantastic operating system release (let's face it, Windows Server 2003 and R2 were very good, too) and is packed full of features that have the potential to …
I played with 2k8 on my desktop for a couple weeks recently. I loved 2k3 as a desktop OS, until sp1 made it kind of irritating (couldn't play quake anymore...) I haven't run (or wanted to run) Vista on any of my hardware, but 2k8 seemed fast even compared to my previous copy of XP.
I love some of the things that they've done with Explorer - namely the auto-sizing columns in details view, the actually useful error messages that show up during file copies or delete actions, and the speed boost to just about everything.
I have all of my moderate collection of music in one large directory, because I'm far too lazy to organize things. It takes XP a while just to show the directory each time I open it, even with the media details disabled. 2k8 not only reads and displays the directory rapidly, but it'll cache the results somewhere, so the second time around is much faster, and that's with the media details displayed.
I also got approximately double the speed for file copies over gigabit from my samba server (from 40 to 80 MB/s) in addidion to many fewer random pauses and glitches using samba.
I didn't have Aero on (I'm a fan of the win 2k look,) but my hardware isn't particularly fast or new, and I was impressed with the responsiveness of everything.
Of course the CAD program that I absolutely need to have didn't want to run on 2k8, so now I'm back on XP. I'm no fan of MS, but it seems like they did a lot of things right. Except that whole snafu with the protected content stuff ruining all the audio and video drivers, it seems like they're on the right track.
I went to the Microsoft campus in Reading last year, to attend what was meant to be a technical discussion but was actually a sales pitch on Exchange 2007 and SharePoint. What I found was that, all the MS employees that brought their laptops up and did demos were running various Server 2008 betas / RCs rather than Vista, and were saying how well it performed.
I like Vista, I do. But from experience, 2008 Server does run a hell of a lot better.
I haven't got a chance to really kick the tires yet, but so far I would say it is as bad as Vista: It is 5GB instead of 700MB (really guys, what is all that for?) It takes just as long to install as Vista, It runs very poorly on the three VM's I've installed it on, noticeably slower than my Win2k3 VM's of the same specs (and don't you give me that "it's supposed to run slower, its new!" BS). They kept the obnoxious dialogs that get in between you and TCP settings, and they have the same deplorable GUI. Oh yeah, and things I used to like to do, like say, alter password policies, I now have to do in ADSI Edit with cryptic key/value pairs, instead of just a nice GUI where I set Password History=5, and away I go.
I haven't seen a single thing that makes it an improvement over 2k3 yet. (Maybe IIS7, jury’s still out on that).
About 8 weeks ago I went through the pain of upgrading Vista to SP1 on my laptop, it kind of felt better but still left me wondering if it was time to upgrade the laptop.
About 5 weeks ago I scratched the lot and installed Win2K8, the difference is startling. It feels like I have a new laptop, the apps respond quickly, throughput is up and it works just great. Almost everything works and I don't have a clutter of useless crud that Vista seems to think I should have.
The only app that doesn't work is Microsoft's own MSN Messenger, but Trillian sorts that out.
Vista always seemed to be busy constantly trawling through the hard disk for no known reason and quite reluctant to stop when you wanted it to do something important.
If you can afford it, or most likely get it from an MSDN subscription, this is the best Windows desktop you'll have until the mythical Windows 7 pops up.
The kernel between the two systems is virtually identical, but then the kernel is only a few MB of core functions, it's what you do with it that makes all the difference. It's the server group who write and control the kernel and then write the higher level services that manage applications and shovel data. I think this pisses off the workstation group who aren't allowed to touch those bits, makes them feel like 2nd class voles. To make up for it, they design piles of shit to go in to the workstation version and pretend that they're "top gun" programmers.
As stated by another contributor, Vista doesn't bring so much in terms of new features. Especially now that MS admitted that they need the anti-malware crowd back in to secure the thing.
As stated above (again), you can run an alternative OS on hardware with half the specs and still have better performance (with the very same "fnew eatures" - and more).
Anyway, what would you expect from an OS build on "Quick and Dirty Operating System", especially when they took the "quick" out? MS history tells it all, folks. (To be honest, I believe that QDOS was a good base. Too bad it fell in the wrong hands. MS might even be able to come up with good software if they ditched a few PR droids and hired more developpers instead. How many MS employees does it take to replace a bulb?*)
Now I'm not saying that MS is a pile of shite and nothing else. A pile of shite it is, but to be honest they made the clueless-lusers-friendly approach mandatory for everyone else, which is why we now have (useless but shiny) "friendly" graphical interfaces for Linux (just an example). And, I'm ashamed but I must admit that I sometimes welcome it (for one-shot jobs, when I'm too lazy to RTFM).
--
* 20 PR droids to trick the customer into thinking that he doesn't need light right now, while the only tech is building a new bulb from used parts.
...they spent too much work putting it in Vista. If every music pirating asshole (sorry guys), could just install 2008, they would. Besides that, MS has built the whole driver architecture around DRM. You *really* think that, when vendors can't even come up with a set of drivers that work for Vista, they are going to miraculously create *another* set of working, DRM-free 2008 drivers? I bloody well fucking doubt it. Just like Server users are forced to have the same slow-ass GUI code in place, they will definitely be subject to the same DRM crippled drivers, ironically on machines that will never have a monitor attached, and certainly never play an blue ray DVD.
And all this because MS realizes the market expansion for consumer OS's is dead, as they are essentially feature complete, there is no more (paying) user base to add, and no one wants a new OS anyway, much less to pay $400 for it.
Instead they are working on a model where they make money from the back-end (content producers), essentially the same as Comcast and AT&T are trying to do. Consumers are cheap sods, and corporations are always looking for increasing revenues, so they will try to create as many hidden revenue streams as they can.
The sad thing is that this is all at the expense of the IT pro's who just want a fucking OS that works. And everyone will just run to Linux anyway. Same as how CompuServe died when the Internet reached consumers. You can lock people in to create revenue, but only until something else comes out, and they leave. Far better to just give them all what they want all along, but who am I to judge what I want anyway?
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I this takes a bit of imagination, but maybe the engineers at MS are smart enough to write DRM code that can de simply disabled in builds where it's not deemed to be needed. Drivers are hardly an issue - who puts an "XFi Xtreme Audio" card or a TV card in a server and, yes, without DRM, maybe even Creative could come up with half decent drivers. As for "asshole" pirates They'll continue to use XP or switch to Linux. The DRM in Vista isn't there to stop pirates. How much torrented copyrighted material has the DRM left in? Exactly none, I'll bet. It's there to stop casual copying which it does very effectively. That this is a solution to an issue that has long since passed into history is, well, typical of MS.
I'm with Matt and Mectron on this - cherchez la DRM.
"Server 2008 delivers new features that customers wanted, whereas Vista delivers new features that Microsoft thought its customers should want. "
Not exactly. Server 2008 seems to deliver features with the ability to customise them and not lose performance when performing the same tasks as 2003. (I say seems because I haven't used it yet).
Whereas Vista was apparently incapable of copying files across my home network when I had the misfortune of obtaining a machine pre-installed with it. That's the big difference I think - Vista has a shinier interface but doesn't seem to work properly for even basic tasks. Server 2008 at least seems capable of performing the task requested of it.
I would like to see some benchmarks comparing 2003 R2 to 2008.
I here a rumor not sure if there is any truth that 2008 does not have DRM built in so it is faster- not sure who asked for it to be built into Vista - hopefully they'll skip in in Windows 7 or leak a patch on how to remove it from Vista if that is the cause for the incredibly bad performance with Vista.
As CTO & professional developer for a software company I ran Win 2003 Server for years as it gave me access to all the server features such as IIS6 that our software runs on.
I moved to Longhorn and to Visual Studio 2008 as my dev platform which was a bit unstable and seemed quite sluggish sometimes - WiFi regularly crashed the machine for example so I only used it when I had to. Aero was pretty cool.
I've recently rebuilt the machine with the release version of Server 2008 and VS08 and have to say that its brilliant. Its faster than Win2k3 and the Aero UI is great to work with. WiFi works now and its faster than Longhorn.
All in all - its by far the best working environment I've ever used (I use a Dell M6300 laptop which is also pretty good).
Big thumbs up from me!!
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"
"The short answer is that Server 2008 delivers new features that customers wanted, whereas Vista delivers new features that Microsoft thought its customers should want."
....what new features are these?
"
Does that question come from the premise you're a customer? Given the interesting(ly twisted) definition of "customer" we use at work (in that it has an "internal" and an "external" context), if you've bought a computer with Windows preinstalled, you're the shop's customer and the shop is Microsoft's.
Food for thought.
I use both, vista at home and vista & 2008 at work, I've had no issues with either apart from the early RC's. I've had no performance issues with either and all the people who moan about performance are idiots with crap machines. Guess what Linux on a 64MB 90Mhz P1 won't run my MPEGs, technology moves on and so do OS's, if your not going to update you machine don't bother updating your OS, sometimes I think the Linux lot just want us to live in some nostalgic past of shell interfaces.
Microsoft OS's are the all round best, with them you can work and play on the same machine.
"Especially now that MS admitted that they need the anti-malware crowd back in to secure the thing."
Who in Hades said that?! Wasn't it only a few short days ago that Virus Bulletin Magazine trashed 17 out of 37 (or something) anti-virus products because they couldn't do their job on Vista?
The only ones I've heard say something like that was VB Magazine themselves. But then, their revenue comes from AV ad subscriptions. Saying anything else would kill their business model. But you have to give them credit for this line:
"Security vendors have had plenty of time to develop Vista products, so there's little excuse for the failure rates unearthed by the [VB100 2007] test."
That was from last year. They told their readers that popular anti-virus software failed to do its job. I never thought I'd see someone INSIDE the PC security industry say that.
I could get Vista to run securely and reasonably quickly on a 512 MB machine, P4 2 GHz, integrated video. Sure it wouldn't launch Aero (not enough RAM), but I'm about the Win2K look myself. Basic worked fine. Java apps worked fine. And it was safe enough - I went to a few adware sponsored sites and I couldn't trash the machine. Of course I used a standard user account...
And Happy Hatching Day, El Reg!
Gordon, I think the reference you are looking for is:
http://www.regdeveloper.co.uk/2008/04/08/mundie_windows_interoperability/
Anyway, Windows just doesn't float my boat, I have to run very ressource-hungry processes and I can't afford to spend 2,000 $ per desktop. Especially when I can have the work done on 700$ machines, with the same performances, just by using another OS.
Vista's been running ok for me using MS-supplied bits, exceptions are a couple Dell notebooks with Vista pre-installed. A support rep let slip in chat with my daughter that the M1330 factory Vista image might have been a little bit corrupted and she may want a bare-metal install from DVD. (Next day another tech nixed that and had her re-image -again- from the rescue partition.)
Meanwhile the home-built system using MS' dvd runs fine. DRM seems to slow Media Player pretty bad once you load it up with a few hundred CD's.
2008 has surprised me in the lab for quickness and stability. The GUI makes it deceptively easy for more people to manage. Not everyone wants to know the joy, power, and intuitive ease-of-use vi and vim can afford us, and even some admins think they have better things to do than write their own device drivers.
For appliances, though, I don't think we'll be jumping off RHEL, centOS or Suse anytime soon. Nothing like an arcane OS where the only standard look-and-feel is the command line, to keep people from touching your stuff.
"Guess what Linux on a 64MB 90Mhz P1 won't run my MPEGs"
Guess what, it will. Perfectly good example. Thank you very much for proving how clueless MS fanbuoys are about the REAL capacities of a computer.
"I think the Linux lot just want us to live in some nostalgic past of shell interfaces."
I think you never actually saw a Linux box. I also think you have no idea on how console mode is thousand times more efficient than lame point-and-click for about everything.
"Microsoft OS's are the all round best, with them you can work and play on the same machine."
MS OS are the best, you can play and play (and play) on the same machine. Provided it is a state-of-the-art overpowered superbox. Work? Sure. Work efficiently? Not.
On the other hand, you can run Linux on a cheap machine and work (efficiently) and play. With better performances. Or you can run Linux on your superbox and have 10 times better performances than with MS OS. And more features. You could probably have even better perfs by running a less "generic" OS, but you'd not be able to run so many games as under Linux probably.
Now if you want to waste good hardware by running a crippled OS on it, go ahead.
While some people who have never seen Ubuntu claim that Linux is not yet ready for the Desktop, it is not disputed that Linux is a good choice for servers.
So the competition for Microsoft is a lot stiffer in the server business, so they actually need to put some effort into offering what the user wants. After all, even Dell sells servers without pre-installed operating system.
On the Desktop side you can just force Vista on your customers. Most people won't know the difference between Vista and Ubuntu anyhow.They take what they get without questioning.
If I was Microsoft, I'd slowly work on positioning Windows servers as application servers, where you just connect via RDP and execute your Windows applications. There is no need to place a Windows box at every workplace. One application server per department is enough.
OK, I'll admit it (I admitted as much months ago on my LJ anyway). I tried W2k8 and I didn't exactly hate it. It was Beta 3 though, and it did flash up at least one mention of its Vista heritage during the installation, but it went on reasonably enough. I tried it with and without the Desktop Experience (my only though as to why you might want it is if you have a remote access setup where the users might actually want it).
I will also admit that the installation was on a fairly low spec machine too. A PIII laptop, to be exact!
I'm a little annoyed that it has all the nags that Vista has but, aside from that and the amount of work required to open up the bits you need that W2K3 and earlier always assumed you would need anyway, it didn't handle too badly. The machine it was loaded on had WXP prior to that, and it seemed that there was little difference in the overall handling, though obviously there were odd bits and pieces that needed work at the time.
The thing is, however, given the recent agg about Vista, the availability of SP1 and all its problems, the ongoing nags about its handling and the inevitable gripes about trying to get it to work on older machines and such, I really wonder if M$ has someone in the workstation side of things whose job it is to deliberately sabotage the product?
(Oh yes, and this was entered from my newly upgraded openSuSE 10.3 machine... then I find that they are upgrading to version 11 in a couple of months! I just can't win!!!)
Are there any HD (as in HDTV, HD-DVD, Blu-Ray, etc) capabilities built to Server 2008?
The DRM in Vista was demanded by the "entertainment" industry, under the guise of "Trusted Computing". Trusted computing didn't mean that the end user could trust their OS to be safe, secure, or even work right, it meant that the pigopolists could trust MS not to let HD DVDs (oops) and other valuable "content" be "backed up" as easily as they can under earlier OSes. HD support gives them and MS an excuse to put the "trust" stuff into the OS. No HD support, no need for the "trust" baggage. (For various technical reasons, the HD/DRM support needs to be there even when HD content is not actually involved, if the system has HD capability).
The reason the entertainment corporates are scared wotsitless about this "trust" stuff is that they have a business model at risk; for every iTunes download the record companies get half the revenue, which is around five times what the performer gets, five times what the writer gets. See why they're scared?
"Guess what, it will. Perfectly good example. Thank you very much for proving how clueless MS fanbuoys are about the REAL capacities of a computer."
Uhm, dude... Throw in a modern mpeg4 with HD content, and I seriously doubt that 90MHz first generation Pentium will do you much good. It usually takes a 2GHz+ CPU bonded together with a powerful GPU to cough out anything watchable with today's mpegs, regardless of OS.
"I've had no performance issues with either and all the people who moan about performance are idiots with crap machines"
An amazing statement considering the constant issues have hit mainstream press repeatedly.
Reviewers and press are going to be the last people to be running "crap machines". If they are running fast machines and are having issues, how do you think the bloke who goes to PCWorld and buys a Celeron with 512 meg of RAM is going to cope with Vista being pre-installed?
Then again, who are they to have an opinion if your machine is working fine?
Paris: Not even she has upgraded to Vista.
I'm not being a 'tard about this, I know a whole load of OS's do a lot of things a lot better than windows does, and I know that windows is bloated. But no other OS that I've used does what I need a PC to do and that's monitor hundred of server and client PCs, develop scalable application fast and play games. Hey maybe in 5 years I might try linux again but at the moment I doubt (unless you have the time to waste) it can be more than a home OS for playing videos and surfing the web.
Anywho don't flame me for this, I know the capabilities of linux, I know my TV, router, and telephone exchange, hey even my PC has an inbuilt Webserver running it, I know it can do brilliant things efficiently, but that ain't going to make me no cash, only Windows can do that, which is my point.
And it's true all my machines are big and beefy and Vista run perfectly on them, they sit there running web services, streaming Sky to the rest of my house and playing my games. Yes it is "An amazing statement considering the constant issues have hit mainstream press repeatedly." but I have never had any issues and I would think that the majority of vista users who have half a brain and don't go clicking porn ads can speak from the same slate.
"Throw in a modern mpeg4 with HD content, and I seriously doubt that 90MHz first generation Pentium will do you much good."
It clearly depends on the mpeg. I also admit you'd get a VERY frustrating "viewing experience" with a huge HD mpeg4. but it will run nonetheless. Now try to launch the same mpeg on the same machine with any MS OS installed. I'm not sure you could even install the codecs before you throw the box through the window. A friend of mine asked to "fix" her old box (PII cadenced at 333 MHz, RAM=64M) for her parents to browse the interwub on it. Even Win98 was swapping like hell (just the OS, before you'd try to run any app). It was running just fine with a DSL liveCD though. Internet experience: perfect, advanced interactive image processing (300 Mo TIFF stacks): acceptable, text processing: very good, movie watching: excellent (I didn't throw recent mpeg files at it though, I like my movies without glitches and lag. But again, all was running in RAM with no swap space). She was impressed by the performance of her old PC, but strangely she didn't let me reformat the thing and install a Slackware or a Debian on it. Too bad, as this still perfectly usable machine is probably in a dumpster by now.
As for the "2Ghz" limit, I'm pretty sure you can seemlessly play any MPEG4 movie with less than half that processing power (in the Asus EEE, the Celeron is cadenced at 900 MHz. Still roughtly10 times more than 90MHz, but I never implied that a huge mpeg could run _seemlessly_ on the PI box depicted above. It will run, which is in itself impressive).
Now a "green computing" advice to all the MS fanbuoys around: instead of dumping your 7-yo box, give it to a *NIX fanbuoy, he will still be able to get more work out of it than you'd ever get out a state-of-the-art Winbox (and he will waste his time playing stupid old CPC games on it, too). Advice number 2: keep the old box in the attic for 15 more years, and then SELL it to a *NIX fanbuoy (Oooops, shouldn't have said that).
I'm currently experiencing deity problems, sorry if I didn't get your pseudo right.
Anyway, I understand your point of view. Especially the "I need to make cash and who else than MS can help me with that" part. 2 things:
- sucks to be you, mate (sorry, couldn't resist)
-Linux can do much more for you than "browsing the web and watching vids". Actually, that's what Windows was designed to do. Linux is supposed to allow you to use your computer instead. I think that you might want to avoid saying things like "at the moment I doubt (unless you have the time to waste) it can be more than a home OS for playing videos and surfing the web." unless you want to be seen as a complete moron. The main use of Linux in the modern world is as part of LAMP, which has very little to do with watching vids at home (except that it allows the servers to run of course). Now if your angst was directed at Ubuntu, I might agree. I'd help you wiping this thing off the face of the world. Once we're done with Windows, that is.
-"Anywho don't flame me for this, I know the capabilities of linux, I know my TV, router, and telephone exchange, hey even my PC has an inbuilt Webserver running it, I know it can do brilliant things efficiently, but that ain't going to make me no cash, only Windows can do that, which is my point." The cash thing is acceptable (you could also earn money in the Open Source world, but not as much and not as easily probably). The rest is just flame bait. I'm running Linux on a few machines, and I can do text processing, data analysis, figure formatting and "sysadmining" much faster than on any MS OS. I get better/shinier/more reliable (apply where relevant) results, too. I did have to patch some code to have things done EXACTLY the way I wanted, but with "closed" code I wouldn't even have known how things were done! (btw, I know it's 3 things now and not 2, but the first hardly counts, right?)
-(now it's 4) Linux is probably not the Jesus OS. There are more secure OSes around. There are faster OSes too. But heck, none of them is designed by MS! Bwahahahaha!
You're right of course, reviewers and the press are going to be the last people to be running "crap machines". On the negative side there's a feature from a Register writer, and on one of them there's a low user rating. If you look through the comments form users, most of them are either not users of Vista, or running bad machines.
Seriously, can we just drop the FUD now, it's been out long enough, it IS a good OS, if you have the hardware for it. We've been through this every time a new MS OS comes out, and eventually people end up liking it (except for ME, but that one was understandable). It HAS good reviews, the people who use it on a capable system ARE happy with it in general, and a lot of the issues are down to either badly written 3rd party software/drivers or just poor hardware. Yes, the zipping and network copying still needs a bit of work, but the other file issues have been fixed with SP1. So really, let's just stop this already. It's getting boring. It still isn't the year of Linux, Macs will always be overpriced and inherently flaky, and Windows will always require better hardware on a version upgrade, and use a few more resources. But overall, it's a better and easier user experience, and anyone who posts complaining because they can't turn off UAC needs to stop reading an IT news site and re-evaluate the job they're in, as does anyone who bought a Dell or PC World computer and found out it was underpowered. If you want to spend that much on a PC you might as well buy a Mac, it'll be easier on everyone.
If you've used Vista SP1 on capable hardware for a prolonged period then fine, comment. If your problem is with drivers or software, or you don't really have a clue about Vista but want to comment to look clever, stop. Never have I seen so much bollocks talked about a new OS, or as many sheep just trotting quite happily off a cliff to fit in.
From the first page of googling Vista review:
http://www.bit-tech.net/bits/2007/01/30/Windows_Vista_review/7
http://www.trustedreviews.com/software/review/2007/01/30/Microsoft-Windows-Vista/p1
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,2088443,00.asp
http://reviews.cnet.com/windows/windows-vista-ultimate/4505-3672_7-32013603.html
Can't be arsed to find any more than that. 4 is more than enough.
Many people felt Windows NT, designed for business desktops and Windows 2000 to an extent were far superior on the home desktop to Windows 95, 98 and ME to the point people hacked DirectX to work on NT4 so they could play games on it.
It really does seem that Microsoft are much more sensible when it comes to their server OS.
In all honest, for all the slagging off Microsoft gets, major parts of their business are quite good nowadays - certainly their developer section is second to none, their office suite is certainly the best out there, their games division is pretty cool and as pointed out here, nowadays their server OS's are also pretty damn good.
It's really just Microsoft desktop OS that's always been full of problems, whilst there were some good releases i.e. Windows 2000, and Windows XP SP2 the others have been relatively poor.
Microsoft's biggest problem is that it's their desktop OS that most people know them for, more people see Windows desktop every day than any of their other products by a massive difference and as such if Microsoft want to change the image people have of them they need to make people like their desktop OS.
This is a bit OT of this article, but i had to respond to this:
"I've had no performance issues with either and all the people who moan about performance are idiots with crap machines"
I have a Laptop (Core2Duo 2.2ghz 3gb ram (mb can´t handle more) 2x 160gb hd and a Nvidia GF8), i only have Vista and office + firefox + updated drivers installed, i don´t use Aero. It´s not the fastest laptop you can buy, but should be enough for Vista, however Vista is so slow on my computer that it unusable, everything is slow, showing a menu can take 1-5sek (and that was both with a clean install and factory install). If i run Xp pro on the same laptop and start a new Xp + .Net and Netbeans (under Wmvare) that second Xp (on emulated hardware) is still alot faster than Vista is when NO PROGRAM IS EVEN USED IN VISTA.
And if all computers that is slow in Vista is crap, how fast Laptop do you need just to run Office? (i don´t even want to know how slow Vista would be on the 1.6ghz 1gb ram Laptops being sold with Vista).
The "same codebase" only means that the source code is common. That source code likely has many conditional compilation switches and other configuration parameters that can vastly alter performance of the resulting binaries.
For example:
* Different buffer sizes (maybe some server drivers/stacks are configured with bigger buffers).
* Turning various features on/off (caching, DRM, etc etc).
"Vista? 40% slower than XP"
Stoopid, stop being "an idiot with [a] crap machine". "if your not going to update you machine don't bother updating your OS". Obviously "technology moves on and so do OS's", stop moaning and welcome our Vista overlords who found a use for all these unemployed CPU cycles! (Copyright SpitefulTHING for all the double-quoted material.)
I finally got my hands on a 2008 machine, I must admit that it seems much more usable than Vista (OK, the hardware was beasty, so I probably missed the performance issues, but I tried Vista on beefy hardware too, and it still kinda sucked). AFAIK, Server2008: 1, Vista: 0 (and, of course, anything not MS:>10^8. But I might well be biased, somehow).
"Fine. So give Aero as an installable option for TS servers, if your TS users are really such fwagile bunny wabbits that they'll sulk if they don't get all the frippery.
But why inflict it on servers that are just... being servers and serving...?"
If it's an installable option, how is that infliciting it on your servers?
I have seen the most bizarre software glitches in Vista, on several machines. Actually, on every machine with Vista that I have had the misfortune to work with. It is shiny, yes, but the bizarre glitches and random crashes make Vista one operating system that I hope to avoid for as long as possible. My two primary computers still run XP.
"While some people who have never seen Ubuntu claim that Linux is not yet ready for the Desktop"
Having just installed Ubuntu 7.10, I can tell you Linux is definitely not ready for the Desktop. Out of the box (fresh off the install CD) it came up with a static IP address. Not DHCP, static IP. Heloooo? A desktop OS with static IP?!
Attempting to reconfigure the network interface (enter password first -- Vista UAC looking positively sleek in comparison) to use DHCP resulted in the error "no default route entered". As if a DHCP-configured system needs a default route -- it'll get one from the DHCP server! But no, I had to enter one to get out of the config app. OK, so I told it to use DHCP. Has it got an IP address yet? No, seems configuring DHCP doesn't actually mean it drops the static IP and tries to get an IP address. At this point I rebooted back into XP... had better things to do with my time.
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