james mckay dot net

Over the past week or so I’ve been moving to a new computer at work. This is partly because my old machine had been going for nearly two years without a re-installation of Windows and was beginning to get cranky as a result, but also because I needed to move to Windows Server 2003.

Yes, you read that correctly: I am now using a Windows Server 2003 box as a workstation.

There is actually a very good reason why you would want to do something like this: SharePoint development. You can not install SharePoint on Windows XP or Windows Vista, which means that up to now we’ve had to remote desktop into our main development server for much of our SharePoint work. It works up to a point, but that way I don’t have all my other tools such as Reflector, Paint.net, Tortoise Subversion and Dreamweaver immediately to hand and set up the way I like them, I have to spend an inordinate amount of time shunting files to and fro across network shares (a very annoying faff), and I haven’t been able to make the most of my dual vertical monitor setup.

Now as Windows Server 2003 is built on the same code base as Windows XP, you would think that you are simply dealing with a souped-up version of XP on steroids. However, in practice, things are never that simple.

Out of the box, Windows Server 2003 is not configured for any of the cool stuff. It has a whole raft of settings that you tend to just take for granted when it’s running on a box in a server cabinet or a data centre and only ever gets accessed by terminal services. These let it take all the boring bits in its stride, but if you want to use it as a workstation, you have quite a bit of leg-work and tweaking to do. However, there is a pretty comprehensive guide on how to get it to behave like a workstation rather than a server, so it seems that if you want to run both MOSS 2007 and Lego Star Wars on the same box, it is possible. In theory, at least.

Windows XP hardware drivers tend to be up to snuff, at least insomuch as Windows XP drivers are up to snuff in general, but I had quite a struggle getting the video card to work correctly, and eventually I had to disable DirectDraw and Direct3D accelerations to stop it crashing altogether. I am not sure whether it’s the driver, the video card or the OS that’s at fault there, but since my work doesn’t involve anything that requires DirectDraw or Direct3D acceleration, fixing it has had to take a back seat.

The only real downside is that the current version of Windows Live Writer stubbornly refuses to install. It’s a bug or a design flaw in the installer, and there is apparently a workaround for it, but you can blog from Word 2007, so for the time being I won’t worry too much about that. However,I don’t think I’ll be in much of a hurry to deploy Windows Server 2003 similarly at home, especially when you consider that Windows Movie Maker is also absent.

And yes, perhaps I could have waited for the Windows Server 2008 RTM. However, with a survey at the start of this week showing that even after about nine months, 90% of IT professionals have concerns about migrating to Vista, and half of them have no plans to deploy it, I don’t think I’ll worry too much about that just yet either.

Posted at 23:52 on 23 November 2007.
Tagged: Windows Server 2003