Hi,

My first post here.

I'm an IT Pro and next year I intend to "deep dive" into SQL Server. (I use it in my job, but only as one of many tasks.)

I want to install it on Server 2008 R2 and came across this site. My ideal is to install it on a laptop and was wondering if there were any reasons why it wouldn't work on this model and spec?
Acer Aspire 5750, Notebook, Intel Core i5-2430M Processor, RAM 8GB, HDD 500GB.

Bit of a bargain price at the moment on Amazon.

As an IT professional you are aware of the different types of backup procedures that you can perform. Before you even begin to make changes to the net book it never hurts to create a system image ON SEPARATE media so you can always have something to fall back on. You can use the built-in windows 7 backup and restore utility to create a recoverable system image, preferably to an external HDD.

I see that the Acer Aspire 5750 comes with Windows 7 preinstalled so the drivers should be compatible because they are operating on the same code base as R2. The only fallback I see in terms of your pursuit of making this an R2 workstation laptop is manufacture compatibility. For some reasons manufactures feel necessary to block installation on unsupported OS's despite the fact that the driver works perfectly fine on a server OS. Keep in mind that you have purchased a consumer netbook and as such there is a consumer OS (7 home) in it.

About the only problem I can see you running into is compatibility with vendor-specific software like for example Intel. My buddy is running R2 on his Intel Desktop Board but the Intel Desktop Control Center is incompatible with a server OS. I was able to modify the MSI package using Orca to drop the client OS dependency and it worked fine but there's no guarantee that every thing will work this way.

Your netbook meets all the hardware requirements to run R2 so I shouldn't see any problems why you shouldn't be able to run this operating system. But thats why you create a system image to fall back on so that you have nothing to lose when implementing this process.

I was hopefully trying to start a little project of my own using the DISM tool in Windows 7 to strip out all the unnecessary features in R2. I'm not sure if this DISM tool strips out existing packages on the machine or allows you to remove default packages from an image. For example I could strip out all the resource heavy packages such as AD, DHCP, DNS, etc. (stuff that doesn't apply to a workstation) and then rebuild the image. Perhaps I will only keep the essentials like Desktop Experience, .NET Framework, Windows Server Backup, Wireless LAN. The end result would be a truly stripped down "netbook ready" server workstation with a HDD footprint of like 3GB. That would be an ideal server workstation in my opinion. I have to do some more research into this DISM tool to see if its capable of doing what I intend. Be sweet if it works out though.

Thanks for the reply. Very useful comments and info.

Reading the "How-To" section on this site I'd already decided to go for a dual boot. Your point about the system image though I take on board, so for belt and braces I think I'll do a backup first.

Probably be early in the New Year when I attempt the actual work on the project, but I'll be sure to report back here how it goes.

Great. I wish you luck man.

As an IT Professional is there any compelling reason why you want to run R2 as a workstation? I know for some developers it makes sense but what about the average guy who maybe just wants to run a simple file server or web server wouldn't they be better off with a 3rd party utility like Filezilla/Apache and using Windows 7 instead.

I am trying to grasp an understanding as to the real physical differences between the client and the server OS. Jumping on the 2008 bandwagon was a lot easier for me when I switched from Vista because the performance was on par with Vista, and then some. When I switched to Windows 7 I noticed a performance gain both in not only boot time but the throttling of my disk i/o as well. When I decided to try out R2 at first it was a bad experience. The performance was slower relative to my experience with 2008. The boot time was very slow, applications didn't appear as snappy, windows updates crashed my machine a few times. This is not a beta i'm talking about, I am talking about retail here. Granted this is before SP1 days and I expected bugs, but I didn't expect this drastic of a difference.

It took me a while but I figured out the performance drainers of my machine. Believe it or not one of the hugest drains on my boot time (and slow performance) was AV. Switching from AVG Business to ESET drained a good 10 seconds off my boot time. I also shaved a few seconds by eliminating services that I will NEVER use.

Here's another good tip that I found when searching for ways to improve performance. DO NOT use more than one defragging utility. If you use Auslogics, only use that. If you use Windows, only use that. The reason is different defragment utilities index your HDD differently and because of this is offset differently. By defragging with one utility and then another you could impede performance, not gain it.

Later on down the road we figured out how to better optimize this system by introducing boot optimization and readyboost earlier this year. Ever since then my experience with the OS has been fantastic. It took a little while to get it working as a snappy workstation but now its working great.

Not actually compelling. Just that I use this at work. (IT Manager - but I'm a one-man-band as the company only has 60 or so computer users.)

As I want to delve deeper into SQL just makes sense to have it running on Server 2008 R2, mimicking my real work set up, but in an entirely "safe" environment.

Just for information, this works fine on the laptop.

I chose the Dual-Boot method as I thought locating drivers would be quicker - it was.

Server installed and for each device with an issue - lots of them - I simply updated the driver from the driver file store on the Win7 partition. And as the Server Install couldn't find drivers for either Ethernet or Wi-Fi NICs getting these from the driver file store was very quick.

Even the graphics driver worked after the update.

Hope this helps someone else.