Turn Windows Server 2008 into Vista

Windows Vista certainly has some useful features, but who wouldn’t want it to run faster and leaner? The answer to your prayers may come in the unlikely form of a slightly modified version of Windows Server 2008 running on your desktop PCs.

There are good reasons an approach such as this might work: under the hood, Vista and Server 2008 are very similar beasts. Since Vista moved to Service Pack 1, they share an identical kernel and driver model ­ – so there’s broad application and driver compatibility. However, Server 2008 comes without most of the bulk and bloat of the consumer operating system. It’s cleaner, more efficient and, perhaps surprisingly, runs better on less powerful hardware.

This isn’t a new idea: many users attempted the same thing with Server 2003 by trying to convert that into an XP-like workstation environment. However, Server 2008 and Vista, while not identical twins, bear much more of a resemblance as siblings. However, this time it was one of Microsoft’s own developers, Vijayshinva Karnure, who really set the ball rolling by posting his own experiences on his blog.

Karnure develops a lot of code for servers, so it makes good sense for him to run a server operating system on his workstation. However, the server environment isn’t really optimised for standard day-to-day use on the desktop, so he set about transforming it into as much of a Vista-like experience as he could.

Since then, many others have tried the same thing and discovered that in many cases, Server 2008 can make a better workstation than Windows Vista. In this feature we’ll explain the basics of how it’s done and point out the main pitfalls.

Why bother?
While developers will enjoy the accessibility to features provided by running a server OS on their workstation, home users and gamers around the web have also reported improved performance and significantly reduced ‘bloat’. To them Server 2008 is a leaner, meaner version of Vista that simply works better and faster.

Reports from users claim improvements ranging from speed increases of up to 17 per cent to very much-reduced memory footprints. Our own subjective experience shows installing Server 2008 can result in a system that’s much more responsive than Windows Vista. It’s also quite happy running on less powerful hardware than would be sensible for a Vista installation ­ – we managed to build a usable system based on a Pentium III PC with 256MB of Ram, which is well below the official minimum requirements.

But others claim that, having enabled enough features to make the server OS behave like Vista, it runs just as slowly as Vista would have done anyway.