Server 2008 as a Workstation, Chapter 1: Drivers

The first big question was number 1 - were there going to be driver problems? One of the distinguishing characteristics of 64-bit Server 2008 editions is that the universe of hardware drivers is limited to signed drivers. (You can boot x64 Server 2008 with unsigned drivers via a "safe mode" option at boot time, but who wants to go through that routine every single startup?) So, I dutifully made a list of the machine's drivers and hardware model numbers from Device Manager in the system's original Windows XP operating system.

The good news here was that after a vanilla install of Server 2008 Enterprise Edition, most of the Latitude's drivers were up and running. There were only two that the installer didn't recognize: the wireless driver and the sound driver. My theory was that the Vista x64 drivers that Dell publishes on its website should work, due to Vista and Server 2008 having essentially the same kernel and architecture. However, after a few years in this business, you get leery of making too many assumptions.

I was glad to find that the sound driver (which I'd downloaded beforehand using the XP incarnation of the laptop) seemed to install just fine - and it actually worked, too, at least after I went to the Services console and set the two sound-related services to start automatically ("Windows Audio" and "Windows Audio Endpoint Builder"). One down, one to go.

The wireless driver installed OK, but it immediately failed with a fatal error (APPCRASH) that repeated about, oh, once a second. The light bulb moment was that Server 2008 doesn't activate the wireless service by default: you have to install "Wireless LAN Service" as a "feature" in Server Manager. After that, and a reboot, the wireless adapter was happy and there was no yellow in Device Manager (which in Server 2008 appears in the Server Manager console under the Diagnostics category). The answer to question 1, at least in my case, was "yes."

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