It's The Little Things

gblahaerath — Wed, 15 Nov 2006 22:12:00 GMT

If it is possible for a man to love an operating system, it would be Longhorn server. I'm only just cracking the surface with it and NOTHING is cooler. The initial configuration tasks window you get after install is so refined and perfect. Who could have possibly imagined that a simple DVD could convert a thing of cold steal and heartless glass to something warm, loving and sophisticated. Who? No one until now.

Look, maybe some of you have never had the experience of installing a web server using Windows 2K3. If you haven't, consider yourself lucky. It's not the worst thing in the world, nor is it as bad as previous operating systems, but it is clunky. Lots of jumping through check box lists with poor navigation and, if you should be so unfortunate as to have misplaced your server CD or had the drive letter change of your CD drive, you'll have to show the installer multiple times where it can find its obscure DLLs. Maybe once or twice its okay, but I've done it thousands of times in my life.

In longhorn, all those bits are kept on the hard drive and the operating system KNOWS where they are. So, when you ask seek to install something, it installs! No questions, no confusion, it just goes. It asks you the minimal amount of things it needs and runs away. No stopping in the middle to ask you a yes or no question, no getting lost, no begging for CDs. What a relief!

So yeah, okay, maybe it's a little thing. But in operating systems, as in love, little things mean a lot.

My B20 Life : server

It's The Little Things