As some have noted over the past year, my choice of Windows 2003 Server as my desktop OS, err..laptop OS in my case, is not exactly the norm. It has been a very long time, pretty much since Server 2003's release, that I have used anything else as my desktop for more than a few days time. That being said, there are a few issues that the less devoted have brought up, things that in their own way are accurate. Fortunantly, these issues can usually be resolved, so I wanted to cover a few of them here.
The first thing to keep in mind is that many people think their games will not work on Server 2003. Nothing is further from the truth, and for the most part, every game works fine out of the box, and some even work better. Windows 2003 is stripped down by default out of the box for security, so it actually has a *smaller* memory footprint in default configuration than Windows XP. The only thing that you need to be aware of after install is that hardware acceleration for you videocard is off by default. Simple fix, right click desktop, properties, settings, advanced, troubleshoot, and move that slider all the way to the right. Install issues solved. It could be worse, during beta the sound service was off by default as well...
Another thing that really seems to annoy people is the whole 'You have to tell me why you are shutting down or restarting before I will let you shut down or restart.' I agree, annoying as hell. Fortunantly this is just as easily remedied. You can check out Mike's page to find a step by step walk through on modifying your machine's group policy to eliminate that annoyance. Trust me, “modifying your machine's group policy” is actually alot easier than it sounds.
The next thing, which I guess can be of interest to some is the bland look of the server desktop and skin compared to the bubbly look of Windows XP. This is also easily solved basically by turning on the Themes service, Start, Administrative Tools, Services, find the Themes service, set it to automatically start and then start it. I know I covered it in an earlier article, but it just seemed worth re-mentioning.
The last item I am going to cover in this part of the article is something that I myself was very concerned about. Maybe that means I should have covered it first, maybe not. Doesn't much matter at this point I presume.
Anyhow, the last item I wanted to cover is that in Service Pack 2 for Windows XP, there were MANY nice improvements to the security of Internet Explorer. If you look at the majority of IE fixes since SP2 came out, you will notice that most say 'Windows XP SP2 is not affected'. Considering most critical security issues anymore *are* IE issues, this is a big deal. Well, even though it isnt on the street yet, those of you that have access to MSDN Subscriber downloads can have the same additions to your IE in Windows 2003 Server. Granted you shouldn't install it on a production server, the beta of Service Pack 1 for Windows 2003 is available for download. It adds the enhanced IE security, the pop-up blocker and the option to disable IE plugins, all the things I was envious of in SP2.