I know … I keep bringing this up. It’s been a long road and there were still a couple of things that I found that I needed to really, truly, fully replace Vista/Windows 7 client with Windows Server 2008 R2 for my desktop OS … on both my traditional “desktop” machine and my laptop. I think, finally, I’ve got all of them worked out.
Power Management/Sleep/Hibernate Mode: I absolutely love sleep mode. I see no need to keep my machine running at 100% power all of the time. And I’m impatient so I don’t like to wait for a full reboot if I don’t have to. I don’t do hibernate too much but that’s also nice to have. As I’m sure you are aware, Windows Server has no problem with the whole power management stuff … until you enable the Hyper-V role (which is one of the biggest reasons that I want to run Server 2008). Once you enable Hyper-V, you lose all power management capabilities. In Windows Server 2008, there was nothing you could do about this. When folks raised this as an issue, Microsoft’s response was … tough. Hyper-V is supposed to be on a server and a server never sleeps. It doesn’t matter if you have VM’s running or not either. A lot of folks came up with workarounds/hacks that “enabled” this, with various degrees of success. Well, apparently there was enough of a hubbub for the Microsoft folks to do something about it. You’ll need to create a new boot entry with BCDEdit and set hypervisorlaunchtype to off. Full details and step-by-step instructions are on Virtual PC Guy’s WebLog. You will have to reboot to re-enable Hyper-V (and the hypervisor) but that’s OK for me … I don’t always run VM’s and I’ll accept the reboot for that. It’s not my ideal scenario, but it works.
Zune: This sucked. I couldn’t get the Zune software to install for anything. Improper version or some such nonsense. Which meant that I couldn’t access my Zune pass and couldn’t sync with my Zune unless I dual booted. Apparently, the Zune folks don’t think that Windows Server is an appropriate platform for Zune. Fortunately, I found a post on David Zazzo’s blog that takes you through doing this step-by-step. One note: I right-clicked on packages\Zune-x64.msi and clicked on “Troubleshoot Compatability” … which applied the settings “Skip Version Check”. Just running ZuneSetup.exe … even in compatibility mode … didn’t work.