Windows Server 2003 As My Laptop OS: Maybe Some Other Time
I mentioned a few days ago that my laptop was due for a reinstall and that I would try Windows Server 2003 as my laptop operating system. Well I did just that on Thursday night. Things were going just swell until I was in a meeting on Friday morning. The built-in wireless adapter really drains battery power and my battery was running down fast. Rather than disrupt the meeting by grabbing my adapter, I decided to change the wireless adapter driver to support "power save" mode. The default mode was power save off, so I simply switched it on. Bad idea.
My network connection went down - no way to renew the DHCP address. Tried everything. Turned power save mode back on. Still no go. "Ok, I'll just switch to (uggh) a wired connection." Same problem there! "Wha?? That stupid setting must have messed up my DHCP config." Rebooted, unistalled network adapters, performed voodoo ceremony on my laptop, sacrificed a chicken, still no luck. So I figured, "Just run system restore and restore to last known good config" - it wasn't there. Server version, remember.
Anyway, I didn't hear much of what happened in the meeting for the next 2 1/2 hours. I was too busy scrambling to get my connection back. I'm completely out of commission if I don't have a network connection. (What'd we ever do before networking?)
As soon as the meeting finished I tried overinstalling Windows Server 2003 - that took several hours. Wow! It worked - my network connection was back up; but my screen wouldn't go above 640x480. I rebooted. Excellent, got my 1024x768 resolution back up. What the... network connection broken again. ARRRRRRRGH.
I finally decide that someone has ordained that now is not the time to run a server OS on my laptop and humbly submitted to the will of Bill. I flattened the laptop and reinstalled Windows XP Pro. Bliss again, at last.
While I was at it, I decided to finally upgrade Janice's home desktop machine to brand new hardware. I spent all of Friday night and Saturday morning rebuilding both systems.
While the problem started shortly after my fresh install of Windows Server 2003, I don't blame the problem on the OS. I believe I would've had the same problem with the driver on XP, since the driver is the same one and the core OS is pretty much the same. I'm not about to try changing the setting on XP now to test it though. :) I moved back to XP because after a day of computer wrestling I needed to retreat back to a known safe harbour.
Anyway, things are grand now. My love/hate relationship with computers has swung toward love again.