Microsoft has an obsession with providing awesome deals for students. They also have a slight tendency to shoot themselves in the feet. This is a good amount of both, and thankfully (if you’re a student), it’s in your favor.

Microsoft created the DreamSpark program to give such awesome tools as Visual Studio 2005 and 2008 Professional Edition free to budding Computer Science and Information Technology students with a Windows Live ID. Now, here’s where the fun begins:

Sometime last year, Microsoft added Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition R2 licenses to the DreamSpark program. Even later, they added Windows Server 2008 x86 Standard Edition licenses. Coupled with Vijayshinva Karnure’s step-by-step guide to converting Windows Server 2008 into the ultimate desktop OS published in February of ‘08 on his MSDN blog, the non-technical masses now have themselves a fully functional, relatively-easy-to-configure OS that’s more powerful and more advanced than Windows Vista. Granted, “easy to configure” doesn’t mean “easier to configure than Windows Vista,” nor do you get to have the Windows Media Center, but there’s sadly always a price to pay for FREE. Given a choice between Windows Vista SP1 upgrade for ~65 dollars and Windows Server 2008 Standard Edition for free, which would you choose?

As for the steps provided, I’m not sure if the academic license of Windows Server 2008 allows for Hyper-V, so if you don’t care for Hyper-V support (as instructed in Vijayshinva’s post) or for running any virtual PCs, you can skip steps 1 and 10 on the guide.

The next question: Does Microsoft even support converting the server OS into a workstation/desktop OS? Yep, and not just because of Vijayshinva’s post, but that alone would be a justification for the following reason:

All opinions posted here are those of the author and are in no way intended to represent those of his employer. All posts are provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

-Every MSDN, Technet, and other individual Microsoft employee blog.

Microsoft doesn’t endorse the opinions of its employees, but Microsoft does fully endorse any factual matters being discussed regarding its products, including step-by-step guides, support… anything of a non-opinionated nature which doesn’t involve compromising its products (like hex edits). Is this a technical loophole? Sure, but there’s a second, much better reason for Microsoft to support converting Windows Server 2008 into a desktop operating system: The “Desktop Experience” feature.

The Desktop Experience feature was added to Windows Server 2008 in part because of the absurdly high number of requests Microsoft received from small businesses running a server as someone’s desktop machine (plausible in smaller networks where extra server hardware would be cost-prohibitive). The process for turning Windows Server 2003 into a more desktop-worthy operating system was a bit of a pain, so the desktop experience feature was simply intended to make it a bit easier to implement this usage scenario. It’s fully supported by Microsoft.

Now here’s where the DreamSpark deal beats The Ultimate Steal: unlike The Ultimate Steal (which is limited to university students), high school students can also take advantage of DreamSpark. So, if you’re a student at just about any university or high school, go ahead and nab yourself a copy and save 65 dollars. This is probably the only thing available on DreamSpark which is highly relevant to people who aren’t developers.

(If Microsoft decides to take down the steps, which I highly doubt, you can catch the full instructions on converting Windows Server 2008 from a barebones server operating system to a desktop operating system after the break.)

from Vijayshinva Karnure’s MSDN blog:

1. Enable Hardware Virtualization

My workstation is a x64 machine with hardware virtualization capabilities. This means I can run Hyper-V on my machine. Even if your machine’s hardware supports virtualization it is most likely not going to be enabled by default. You have to enable it via your BIOS setup.

2. Install the latest Graphics and Audio drivers

Being a server OS Windows 2008 carries with it basic graphics and audio drivers. To utilize the full strength of your hardware ensure you install the latest drivers for both graphics and audio hardware. Only with the proper graphics drivers will you be able to enable the "Aero" experience on Windows 2008.

3. Desktop Experience Feature

The Desktop Experience Feature enables a bunch of stuff that is by default present on a desktop OS. Most importantly it includes Themes, Windows Media player and the Aero related features. You will have to enable it form the Server Manager. The "Turn Windows features on or off" / "Add remove windows components" has all been rolled into the Server Manager now.

Server Manager > Features > Desktop Experience

Installing the Desktop Experience feature does not enable them. You have to manually set them up.

4. Themes

To enable Themes you will basically have to enable the Themes Service. Again being a server OS it is not enabled by default.

Services.MSC > Themes

Set the start up type to Automatic

Enabling the Aero Theme.

For this go to Control Panel > Personalization >Theme and select Windows Aero

5. Search

Search is also disabled by default on Windows 2008. Searching is important for me as I use it a lot to find my emails. To enable search you will have to add the File Services Role via Server Manager.

Server Manager > Roles > File Services > Windows Search

Outlook relies on this search service.

6. Disable Shutdown Event Tracker

Since I am using it as a workstation I do not want to keep a track of all the Shutdowns. The Shutdown Event Tracker is the pop up that you get asking you for a shutdown reason. To disable it

Open mmc.msc

Add the Group Policy snap-in

Under Administrative Templates expand System

Set Display Shutdown Event Tracer to Disabled

7. Audio

For audio you need to enable the Windows Audio service. You do this by setting the startup type to Automatic.

Services.msc > Windows Audio

Ensure you have proper drivers for your audio hardware… for me the default driver was not enabling the headphones … it started working fine after I got the proper driver.

8. SuperFetch

As a workstation, enabling SupertFetch will give you that additional bit of responsiveness. The SuperFetch services is disabled by default and when you try to enable it you will most likely ge
t an error message "The operating system is not presently configured to run this application"

You will have to make two registry changes to enable this service. I basically copied them over from my Vista machine.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management\PrefetchParameters

EnablePrefetcher DWORD 3

EnableSuperfetch DWORD 3

9. Get a codec pack.

For media hungry buffs download a codec pack. This will ensure you can play all media files.

10. Enable Hyper-V

With Hyper-V you can run virtual machines on your workstation. This is useful if you want to run your tests on older OS versions. Enabling  Hyper-V is easy

Server Manager > Roles > Hyper-V

Remember you need a Hyper-V enabled Windows 2008 licence and also your hardware has to support virtualization.

Also If you are using an existing VHD it may ask you to re-Activate Windows as it detected hardware changes.

One good thing about Windows Server 2008 is that it no longer asks for the i386 folder like Windows 2003 while you enable features.

On the other hand, the systems which are not supposed to crash are the ones which are associated with bug reporting, user experience improvement, et cetera. So, when said utilities crash, what do you do?

Chris Holmes, a mutual friend of mine and Rafael, recently discovered (along with Rafael) the source of a round of interesting crashes in Windows 7 Beta 1. The bug itself is uninteresting and typical; besides crashing virtually anything running on top of a Windows service which calls the SQM client (a part of the CEIP), it’s nothing big. What interests me the most is that this bug is triggered when the Customer Experience Improvement Program is running.

Catch my abnormally detailed reasoning after the break.

Update: The Windows Team pushed a nicer solution to the Action Center. The solution may need to be re-used every once in a while as disabled sessions accumulate, but it’s better than killing the CEIP outright. Catch more at the end of the post.

Quite possibly one of the most important things to check prior to releasing any beta, minus the critical bugs, are the reporting mechanisms. When those don’t work, a number of issues arise:

1. One or more massive avenues for feedback are now out of The Game, which means less feedback for Microsoft. Jensen Harris discussed with me a while back how critical the Customer Experience Improvement Program was to the success of the Office Ribbon, so losing such an avenue in a milestone build can only be seen as a dramatic loss of resources.
2. Confidence in the build begins to drop. Sure, this is a beta, and as such, it’s acceptable for just about anything to be slightly unstable. However, as I noted earlier, stability is expected if not demanded in the reporting tools. When those fail, what’s to say other elements critical to testing the beta won’t fail as well? Beta means “there could be bugs” but it doesn’t mean “there could be bugs with the tools you’ll need to report the bugs!” Confidence in the “testability” of the build could tank as a result.
3. Once word spreads, the more dedicated beta testers will have to disable the CEIP module in order to proceed with testing other critical components. This means that any user experience quirks may have to be reported manually as opposed to CEIP data being intuitively interpreted to determine where said UX quirks lie. This eats valuable tester resources, though I guess it doesn’t matter given that the beta program itself is being devoured from the inside out by the arrogance of the testers within it. (Paul Adare, I’m looking at you)

The fix? Well, Chris already published one, but Microsoft needs to get CEIP in Windows 7 back up and running as soon as humanly possible. The more people disable the CEIP for the sake of avoiding this bug, the less feedback Microsoft will get and the less potential Windows 7 will have to be the best that it can be upon launch. Sure, it should be fixed just to resolve the MSIExec issues, but that’s not the biggest reason to fix the crashes. After all, the definition of irony is when something designed to avoid a particular outcome actually causes the same outcome. In this case, no tool designed to improve user experience should ever serve to ruin it. Otherwise, the end result will show on your consumers’ faces:

He’s not a happy camper, but then again, it’s not as if other platforms are immune from stupid usability bugs. Thanks goes to our codemonkey Sam for taking this screenshot from Leopard while trying to access the link to Chris’s fix for the SQM client bug on Windows 7.

Until this is all resolved, if you’re a beta tester (edit: and you’re seeing this bug occur), please kill the CEIP in Windows 7 and proceed to report any UX quirks you run into through the submit feedback tool next to the minimize button in the titlebar of every major window. Do NOT use the Windows 7 taskforce. Both Larry Osterman and Brandon Paddock agree that the Windows 7 Taskforce is NOT the appropriate way to submit bugs!

Update: Chris updated his blog with another post that notes the presence of the fix to the problem in the Windows 7 Action Center (the solutions page you reach when you have a crash that Windows can look up and find a solution for). The Action Center simply has the user kill the DisabledSessions key without killing the customer experience improvement program, so disabling the CEIP is no longer a necessity it seems.
Unfortunately, I suspect that this is only a temporary fix, given that the problem originally appeared after some time had already passed with Windows 7 running on a number of end users’ boxes. With this in mind, this process will still likely need to be repeated any time the key is created and filled with any values in order to avoid MSI-based installers from failing yet again.