This week I finally got around to install Windows Server 2008 on my laptop. I have a HP Compaq 6910p laptop, which is a good laptop with 64 bit dual core processor and 4 gb of RAM.

Since I have a 64-bit CPU and have been running Vista 64 for some time without any problems, I installed the 64 bit enterprise edition.

I followed the blogpost: Using Windows Server 2008 as a SUPER workstation OS to get the OS configured. Which got me pretty far, but not all the way there.

For drivers I downloaded the Vista drivers from HP's support page. They worked good except for the bluetoouth driver. But apparently, Microsoft has decided that bluetooth is not for servers, so there is no support. Both my bluetooth mouse and keyboard works with the supplied dongle, but not with the built in device.

I also turned of Internet Explorer Enhanced Security, which is nice on a production server, but extremly annoying on your desktop. This is done in Server Manager - Security Information - Configure IE ESC.

I also use virtual pc's a bit and figured Hyper-V would be cool instead of Virtual PC or Virtual Server, but when I activated this, the sleep function on my laptop no longer worked. I did find a good hack for enabling sleep with Hyper-V. Works ok, but it's not 100% ideal solution.

The current version of Live Messenger would not install either, but the MSI-version of Messenger 8.1 would install. Apparantly you can also copy the installed files from a Vista machine to get newer versions running, but I haven't tried.

Visual Studio 2008, SQL Server 2008, Office 2007, Firefox, Daemon tools all installed wihout any problems.

Final thoughts
All in all, I am very happy with my transition to Server 2008. It seems faster than Vista, and the fact that you have to turn all the bloat on instead of the opposite makes it great.

Update: I got bluetooth devices working using this blog post: Installing the Microsoft Bluetooth Stack on Windows Server 2008