XP sure was great! Remember how awesome Server 2003 was?

S

st4rk

Gawd
Joined
Sep 19, 2003
Messages
1,013
Ugh, I miss the days of Server 2003, it was such a reliable and awesome OS, never crashed and scaled incredibly well. Nowadays 2016 hogs all my server resources and on top of that, the telemetry is transmitting god-knows-what company data to M$'s servers!

Any one else miss Server 2003?
 
2003 was great compared to XP, I was using it for about 3 years.
I don't miss it though. Server 2008 was much better, I lasted also 3 years with it.
I used Win7 for 7 years, now with Server 2016 on two machines and several VMs. Not hogging anything, runs smoothly and I'm happy with it even more than win 2008 :) . Telemetry is something I'm not concerned much, there are bunch of tasks in task scheduler that are stopped, Updates are manual, and because WIndows was always closed source, you had never known what data it transmits during Updates etc. Apart from when updating, I don't see any suspicios activity in my network or task manager.
 
I thought Server 2003 was great for it's day, and I even remember for a while how it was a bit of a thing to modify it and use it as a desktop OS.

My opinions of Server 2008 aka Vista Server edition are tainted because it is the last 32-bit server version of windows, so there are still tons of old servers still using it, even today, with old hardware that can't be upgraded to a newer version of Windows Server. Offices still using an old 32-bit P4 or similar as their server and don't want a new server because it "still works". Shit is going to hit the fan for them as support for 2008 finally ends soon. I really love Server 2012 and Server 2016, if for no other reason than for multi-path SMB. We've been stuck with Gigabit for so long, with 10GbE prices remaining so high, and finally we get a cheap plug-and-play solution that works great and all it requires you to do is plug in more than one network cable on each end.

But really, overall, I think the best Server OS "for it's day" was Windows 2000 Advanced Server.
 
XP Pro x64 was my OS of choice for a long time, it was based on Server 2003 and better for my purposes than doing the "Server 2003 to Workstation 2003" mods. It remains to this day the fastest OS I've ever used on any platform, literally running circles around anything else.
 
Server 2003 was only "Great" because it was the first actually decent server from Microsoft. Before then, Netware blew anything MS out of the water for scalability, reliability, and functionality.
 
tedych said:
2003 was great compared to XP, I was using it for about 3 years.
I don't miss it though. Server 2008 was much better, I lasted also 3 years with it.
I used Win7 for 7 years, now with Server 2016 on two machines and several VMs. Not hogging anything, runs smoothly and I'm happy with it even more than win 2008 :) . Telemetry is something I'm not concerned much, there are bunch of tasks in task scheduler that are stopped, Updates are manual, and because WIndows was always closed source, you had never known what data it transmits during Updates etc. Apart from when updating, I don't see any suspicios activity in my network or task manager.
Click to expand...
Hint: If MS wants to spy on you, you surely won't see any activity using the servers own monitors lol. Study the network traffic with snort.
 
B00nie said:
Hint: If MS wants to spy on you, you surely won't see any activity using the servers own monitors lol. Study the network traffic with snort.
Click to expand...
That's what I meant by mentioning it's closed source and you don't know what's being transferred. Even if you try to study traffic, it's encrypted. You can only study metadata like source/destination, ports, datetime and size.
And as I mentioned, apart from the times when I update, I see no suspicious activity. Not only in Windows own monitoring tools (they don't lie, you can see all connections, load etc.) but I can monitor network connections in my router/gateway.
Windows 10 is another story with all its garbage.
With all that said, Win2003 was very good but it just Was in its days. It waas susceptible to the same performance issues as XP, namely file cache management and thrashing which was a big pain back then wen there were no SSDs or superfetch. Win2008 was tremendously better in this regard, and even on HDD I almost never encoutered slowdowns due to cache issues even after copying very large files around. The new Superfetch then was a life-saver.
Win2016 doesn't have Superfetch but this is resolved with an SSD. Previously I ran it on HDD and it was bad (to say the least) compared to what Win2008 was (or Win7), having the Superfetch.
 
jardows said:
Server 2003 was only "Great" because it was the first actually decent server from Microsoft. Before then, Netware blew anything MS out of the water for scalability, reliability, and functionality.
Click to expand...
I'd say we hit that point with 2000. I used both around the time 2000 was released, kept up on the patches and versions....2000 was the death knell for netware, novell never even considered it might have to start competing.

I say that as someone who, regrettably, was still working with novell shit up until a couple years ago. No lie; the place I was working had such a hardon for novell they were convinced they weren't alone in waiting for the code base to be sold and repackaged with updates that would, and I quote, "blow anything from MS out of the water". It was always "any day now".

Sadly, I would later find out that they really weren't the last hold outs.

As far as my favorite version; I really loved the UIX of 2000. Clean, simple, easy to use. Literally every version since has obfuscated common tasks, adding clicks and overhead.
 
I don't know about the server version as I never used it but I loved Win2k Pro on the desktop. To me, that was the pinnacle of MS OSes for simplicity and usability. XP was a step back in both instances which is one reason I waited until at least SP2 before swapping and as much as I like Win7, I'd still prefer 2k overall. Win7 was the closest MS every got to having a great OS like 2k.
 
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