Hello folks; what a great forum this is!

I have many of my desktops using W2003 workstation and they work very well.

I am looking to update my W2011 WHS setup to a more of a W2008 workstation setup.

I ran the tweaker and it kind of works. I am curious if anyone has done this with W2011 / W2008 Vail?

The 64bit W2011 WHS OS seems to be getting dumped for a measily $50 USD lately on Amazon.

Vail is built on the Windows Server 2008 R2 platform so most of the workstation tweaks should work. You might not have business type stuff like group policy, active directory, dhcp, dns, etc., but the "Windows 7"stuff such as Supefetch, Readyboost, Sidebar should work just fine.

Thank-you halladayrules. Yes much worked and much didn't from the tweaker application. IE: Themes kind of works; but kind of just sits a bit never really going to the screen. Any suggestions?

For that I am not sure. I never bothered applying themes on IE even on the full R2 OS. Perhaps you could use Chrome or FF instead? Much more flexibility there.

Apologies halladayrules. I meant Themes in general not related to Internet Explorer. I put the "IE:" meaning example.

Trying a new W2011 build today. First installed W2011, all the drivers and updates. Next will attempt to add desktop experience Aero Themes.

This endeavor is actually going in the direction of a single function home automation server with this and that. Today utilize a W2003 standard server for the "mothership" home automation server. Really only addition to it are voice fonts. It does utilize VR but I don't use it for much.

Oh HAHA. DUH. You have exposed me as a geek now. I am afraid I am going to have to call in the authority. The certificate authority! hehe

Did you try the Universal Theme patcher (64-bit)? It is what the R2 CONV GUI uses to allow unsigned themes in R2.

lol...same thing here as I am a geek at heart...

The last couple of days mostly dealing with the issues using 32bit TTS voice fonts and the 64bit voice VR engine. I have two means of using VR to the box (even though I don't really utilize it much). Not really caring much about the W7 fluff; just a basic functional W2011 with a bit more than what it offers (Even W2008R2 various flavors wouldn't work with the VR engines).

The "mothership" today does talk to 20 serial devices and 10 touchsceens; so I guess I am pushing it a bit today. I'm into weather somewhat so have three weather stations plugged it to it and it gathers data via 4 DB's running on it. Just one part of many has three different telephony hardware devices which basically do this and that via VB scripts or the built in API's. One touchscreen is really just a virtual radio alarm clock which is mostly just used as that; but it does also look at security stuff, streams internet music, talking per say to the house doing this or that function. Same touchscreen applications works fine in Wintel, IPad, Android or just Ubuntu Linux doing the same for each.

One said device is just a microphone plugged into the microphone input and the other is a kind of do all call center box called "way to call". It enables me to utilize telephone / VR and TTS in an autonomous entity. Such that if you speak into the microphone or speak to a telephone receiver; VR functions do just fine today on the W2003 32bit box.

The "makeshift" current modification that seems to be working but not really is to have two VR engines running. One using the old CPL from the W7 import and the other is via the built in VR engine. The two do not work well together which is causing a bit of a headache.

I did install the 32bit older 5.1 SAPI engine SDK and that did help with the Way2Call 64bit drivers. Personally still kind of kludgy though.

But here we are venturing into something new and unique, "uncharted" waters and I understand I am more than likely trying to do something which has not been done yet with W2008 in general yet.