Richard said:
Old news, and not topical to this newsgroup.
Not old news as far as I know. There has been, however, considerable
confusion about the naming of the various betas. Build 6001 (available
in April 2007), for example, is labeled beta 3, but is actually beta 2.
Microsoft states that the latest beta, which has just become publicly
available, is proposed to be that final beta before what I assume may be
one or more release candidates; i.e., RC1, RC2, etc.
More details are at:
https://www.microsoft.com/servers/faces/default.aspx
Regarding server versus desktop, there are many users who utilize
"server" versions for either desktop or combined desktop and server
applications. One of the multiple reasons for doing this with Windows
Server 2008 is that the software is further in the future in the
production cycle, there is a different team of Microsoft engineers
working on at least some of the aspects of Server and some of Vista's
many problems have been corrected. Server 2008 is available for test and
evaluation at minimal cost until April 2009. It isn't an unreasonable
choice to try it until then and possibly switch to Vista for desktop
only applications at that time if Microsoft has improved that operating
system.
I don't know of a single report from a user who has tried Server build
6001, has not liked it and has not found it to be vastly superior to
Vista. This is in contrast to the seemingly endless complaints and
problems with Vista.
We have, however, now had some problems with beta 3 and had to go back
to beta 2 which, since April 2007, hasn't had a single operating system
crash and has run all of our standard application programs without any
problems.
NaturallySpeaking 9.5, which works flawlessly on build 6001, crashes
immediately on execution with a "privileged instruction" error. A second
problem is that beta 3 doesn't include the Radeon 7000 series video
adapter driver that is in beta 2. This is a big problem for us because
there is no known alternate source for this driver. (As opposed to
software considerations, video adapters on server hardware platforms can
be a real problem).
I should say that the installation was an upgrade rather than a clean
install. The is a legitimate option, but I am well aware that it is
always best to do a clean install. It does, however, take about eight
hours to install the operating system and all the application programs.
The only good news is that the test computer is always backed up using
an Ez Bus DTS SATA drive hardware and a complete restore took only about
18 minutes.
I might try NaturallySpeaking 9.5 on a clean installation of Server Beta
3, but perhaps someone else has already done this and knows if the
program will work on this version of the beta.
