My Windows 2008 Server trial is over, but my 2008R2 trial has just begun...

For the last 6 months, I've been test-driving Windows 2008 Server on my home Windows machine.

The upgrade from XP to W2K8 was painless. I did a full re-install on a new hard drive. The W2K8 installation experience almost rivals the ease of Ubuntu and Redhat Linux installations, but still required a few reboots. I also added 4GB of memory for the price of 40€, so I chose the 64-bit version of Windows to be able to use the full range of 6GB.

W2K8 is much, much more stable than XP was. I've started to trust my Windows computer a lot more after the upgrade. A typical source of flakiness under XP was my KVM. If I accidentally switched out of my Windows computer when it was booting up, the least of my problems would be that I'd have to restart the whole powerup cycle yet again. W2K8 feels much more fault-tolerant.

What seems almost miraculous to me is that the NVIDIA graphics drivers have flaked out a few times during the six months during gameplay, but the only real consequence of that, under W2K8, is that the screen goes dark for a few seconds, while the operating system reloads the drivers. Under XP, that usually meant a power button full reset.

Thumbs up for Windows 2008 from me! The trial period ran out, however, so now I installed Windows 2008 R2 Server, which shares most of its core with Windows 7, over the old installation. The process was quite painless, and since my games are from Steam, I simply had to re-install Steam, and move my steamapps folder under the new Steam directory. Easy as that.

I'm happy with this product. Corporate sysadmins, please, please, upgrade your users to Windows 7 or W2K8R2.