Vista Upgrade at Home & Windows Server Virtualization...
I'm taking some time over the Memorial Day holiday to upgrade some of my gear at the house - namely my main home desktop which I use for a variety of things - digital photo editing with Photoshop, playing games (AOE3 and FS "X" mainly) but I also work quite a bit from it as well. Our internal IT folks have had a farm of 2008 Servers running TS Gateway for awhile so I'll occasionally connect to them for access to the intranet and various WSS sites.
I'm essentially gutting my old Pentium D and replacing/upgrading with an Athlon x64 5600+ dual core, adding 2GB of RAM for a total of 4GB, two 500GB SATA3 drives striped and a nVidia 8800GTS w/640MB RAM.
If I'd have gone whacko on the CPU, I might have achieved the "Windows Experience" Holy Grail of 5.9 across the board. Quad core looked appealing but was out of my budget this time around.
For what it's worth, I'm using the Asus M2N32-SLI Deluxe board and had some bluescreen issues trying to get Vista x64 running. I realized after I had just decided to go ahead with x32 that I had a few USB devices (including a USB hub) that I probably shouldn't have had plugged in during the install - but nothing that should have bluescreened before the setup even completed. That said, other than the x64 issue - I really like this board. Everything worked with Vista out of the box - only drivers I needed to install were for my video card. I installed ASUS's 'probe' utility which is very handy. Typical sensors and such that give you an idea as to what's going on inside the case. I also like the ease of the RAID configuration with this MB. It was very easy to setup my 2 drives in a stripe and even better Vista had the SiLi32 RAID controller .inf's in-box so I didn't have to go digging for a driver to get Vista to see my RAID array. Finally, I'm not much of an overclocker...but with this board it doesn't get any easier. They have an 'auto' overclock feature in the BIOS which basically lets you specify the percentage that you want to overclock - from 3%, 5%, 8% and 10%. I selected 5% and my machine is happy as pie. I've got a decent Antec case and an aftermarket heat sink on the CPU that keeps things nice and cool inside.
So, I'm back to x32 using the PAE switch to get Vista to see all 4GB of my RAM...
In the same boat? Simple...
Open a CMD prompt elevated and use the BCDedit tool in Vista by typing:
c:/>BCDedit /set PAE forceenable
Now, my older x64 machine just received a fresh install of Windows Server 2008 Beta 3 and I'm in the process now of getting WSV (Windows Server Virtualization) up and running. I'm also going to just bite the bullet and move my domain off a very old box running 2003 R2 to the new WS2008 box. I've already completed the ADPREP to get my 2003 schema ready for WS2008...which in of itself was a little adventuresome. I had originally downloaded the x64 ISO and my 2003 R2 install is x86. So, the adprep didn't work because it was for the wrong architecture.
So, I download the 2008 public beta from HERE
Notice how it says doesn't specifically say 64-bit? Well, they are there but you just have to be careful when picking which ISO you download. I inadvertently selected "DE" (German) instead of EN for English and wasted 1.8GB of bandwidth downloading the wrong one.
Careful!!!
Next...I'll make the WS2008 box a DC in my existing 2003 domain and then simply run DCPROMO on the 2003 and let it move all the necessary domain 'stuff' to the 2008 server. Let's hope it works!
*Hopefully*, WSV works on my older box...It's almost finished downloading and I'll fire it up and see...
