A couple of weeks ago I felt that it was time to give my laptop (Dell Latitude D830) a clean install. I’ve been running Vista 64-bit on it and it has worked great. I’ve also been curious at Hyper-V and not totally satisfied with Virtual PC (the vm’s are often to slow).

Said and done, I installed Windows Server 2008 Standard Edition and got on to configuring it and installing features and roles. That WS2008 is not a client OS is a given, but the amount of configuration to get it to work like one was a little over the top for my taste. But hey, what don’t you go trough for learning something new. There is a ton of articles out there describing the steps, here’s a few that I followed:

• Convert your Windows Server 2008 to a Workstation!
• Using Windows Server 2008 as a SUPER workstation OS
• Bluetooth
• Installing the Microsoft Bluetooth Stack on Windows Server 2008
• Enabling Bluetooth on Windows Server 2008

After getting WiFi, Aero and sound working I struggled with Bluetooth which I didn’t get fully working which is a big setback because I use (and love) a bluetooth mouse.

Next step for me was installing the Role Hyper-V. Worked great, took me a while to figure out the how the networking worked and that it don’t work with wireless as Virtual PC. The big drawback for me was that when Hyper-V is installed it disables the laptops ability to Sleep & Hibernate and I just love to be able to slam down the lid, go some place and open it up and continue where I was.

So overall I’m happy with it but the bluetooth and Sleep/Hibernate issues are deal breakers for me, so I’m going back to Vista 64. Should I’ve had a stationary computer I would probably stick with Windows Server 2008 because Hyper-V really rocks!