Mercutio
Fatwah on Western Digital
Well, finally got around to installing 2003 Server EE.
All I can say is, they finally did something right.
Everything is off by default. EVERYTHING. IE's security setting, for the first time ever, is "high", Graphics acceleration, sound (gotta reboot for that one).
Other big pluses: Recognized both the Promise and HPT controllers on my machine. Boots *way* faster than 2000 Server, even as a Domain Controller. Picked up the Via USB2 controller, too.
Adding a "role"? Dead simple. 2K3 may not have anything on by default, but you can point and drool away to whatever kind of server you want. Heck, even dcpromo amounted to about 3 clicks.
Disappointments? It didn't install a driver for the Realtek ACL650 onboard sound. That hardware has been around for more than long enough that they could at least drop it in the driver cache. Also didn't install a graphics driver for my ATI 9000Pro... BUT it did run that card in 1024x768x16bit with the STANDARD VGA driver. This is a great thing, if that driver is decent, since graphics drivers are still a major cause of weirdo 2000 crashes.
The included DirectX is version 6, which is to be expected in a server OS, but this is Microsoft we're talking about, here. They do include MP9 by default. Hoorah for DRM!
Samba connectivity remains broken. Bastards.
The "everything off by default" OS still let me install unsigned drivers. I might've thought MS would move to requiring signed drivers (or at least changing the default driver signing policy for the "Enterprise Edition" server. They haven't.
The default shell looks and feels like ME or the "classic" skin from XP. The only major visible changes are tiny UI improvements (you can annotate your shutdowns for the event log) and speed improvements. Disk management seems to start faster, for example.
Management tools seem mostly unchanged. Maybe we'll all get lucky and they'll roll some of the speedier UI-stuff into XP.
All I can say is, they finally did something right.
Everything is off by default. EVERYTHING. IE's security setting, for the first time ever, is "high", Graphics acceleration, sound (gotta reboot for that one).
Other big pluses: Recognized both the Promise and HPT controllers on my machine. Boots *way* faster than 2000 Server, even as a Domain Controller. Picked up the Via USB2 controller, too.
Adding a "role"? Dead simple. 2K3 may not have anything on by default, but you can point and drool away to whatever kind of server you want. Heck, even dcpromo amounted to about 3 clicks.
Disappointments? It didn't install a driver for the Realtek ACL650 onboard sound. That hardware has been around for more than long enough that they could at least drop it in the driver cache. Also didn't install a graphics driver for my ATI 9000Pro... BUT it did run that card in 1024x768x16bit with the STANDARD VGA driver. This is a great thing, if that driver is decent, since graphics drivers are still a major cause of weirdo 2000 crashes.
The included DirectX is version 6, which is to be expected in a server OS, but this is Microsoft we're talking about, here. They do include MP9 by default. Hoorah for DRM!
Samba connectivity remains broken. Bastards.
The "everything off by default" OS still let me install unsigned drivers. I might've thought MS would move to requiring signed drivers (or at least changing the default driver signing policy for the "Enterprise Edition" server. They haven't.
The default shell looks and feels like ME or the "classic" skin from XP. The only major visible changes are tiny UI improvements (you can annotate your shutdowns for the event log) and speed improvements. Disk management seems to start faster, for example.
Management tools seem mostly unchanged. Maybe we'll all get lucky and they'll roll some of the speedier UI-stuff into XP.
