If you follow my twitter feed (http://twitter.com/crutkas), you may have noticed my Lenovo x300 was being much like a spoiled child today.  For the life of me, I couldn’t keep it stable.  I had the svchost.exe that controlled some pretty critical stuff decide to go nuts on me for some random reason.  It was so bad that I couldn’t even launch task manager.  It was like Chernobyl.

So I went home and saw I had a few day old back up of my data.  I backed up data I knew was brand new, put in my PC restore disk and went away.

I did something bad however … I didn’t trust Windows Home Server’s disk settings.  I was all like, “I roll with 5 gangs and live in the 2nd most dangerous city in the US, I do what I want” and set my c:\ to the active drive when it wasn’t.  So a quick bit of background information, my x300 wasn’t reformatted when I got it and has that stupid hidden partion on it.  So I found out that Lenovo has the boot manager on that partition!  It took me about 3 restores before I remembered that I’m a dumb ass.

Had I not messed with the settings, I would have been back up and going at about 9pm instead of 2:30am.  Still, fun lesson and gave me a few hours to mess with Windows Server 2008 “workstation” on my Lenovo t61p.  I must admit, I made it look like Vista.  It gives me a weird sense of containing power too. 

There is a blog that tells you how to make the server OS into a workstation.  After checking that out, reading for 5 minutes, it took 10 minutes to get all the registry keys and services switched on.  Another Server 2008 tips and tricks that I didn’t see can be found over on blogs.msdn.com.

Now do I think the Windows Server 2008 workstation build is faster than Vista?  Initially I thought good god this is fast.  It does seem to boot and shut down super quick too.  But I think this is jumping to conclusions.  I never ran Vista on the computer by itself.  Also Vista SP1 and Windows Server 2008 kernel are the same.  So what I’m going to do is get another backup with the settings as is on my WHS then do a Vista build.