What are the advantages over running W7?

Interesting. I could have sworn I heard a podcast about 2008R2 where the MS rep stated that we wouldn't be able to use it as a workstation (as we tend to do with our dev machines). He also stated "that's what Win7 is for".

Any limitations you have encountered?

I'll second that, been running a server OS on my notebook (With the apps you mentioned) since server 03 and have had no issues (Except the one below). I find it to run much faster (Except boot up as you pointed out. But boot up is now quite fast in R2). Plus a few mods will get you the workstation UI and functionality.

One thing I will note about R2 that is a problem is with bluetooth. In 08 there was a work around for this but it appears that the work around doesn't work on R2. So my BT mouse works but thats about it. From what I can tell, looking on the internets, the full windows BT stack is not part of the R2 dist. If you could figure out how to manually install it then it would probably work. I guess M$ decided for all of us that BT on a server OS was not important.

Also, I've tried to get the Widcomm BT stack installed (If you have a Widcomm chipset on your radio) and the installer will only work on workstation class OS's. You can get around this and install the "sub installer" but things still dont work and you get a couple of errors. So no luck there either.

Has the issue with High-end graphic cards (especially NVidia) and Hyper-V been fixed in R2 ?

This isn't much an issue on Server machines.

But on workstations which also need 3D / video / graphic editing (and WPF!!!) it really is.

That's the only reason I currently use Vista on my notebook and not 2008.

the window managers on MS products blow.  Coming from a Linux back ground, I can't set the mouse focus and window behavior as a power user would.

Also I love eye candy and nothing compares to Compiz.  MS window managers have no work spaces mapped to a rotating cube.  I once showed this to an MS weenie and he couldn't even understand he was seeing separate work spaces.  He thought he was looking at a rotating jpg.

sorry, I didn't mean to be so negative with my last post.  Its one big world and we all have to live together.  Please take it as a different perspective.

- Greg

R2 looks good, but as I've switched to from HyperV to VMWare Workstation so I'm going to upgrade my workstation 2008 to Win7 and see how that goes.  If there are any other reasons than HyperV to stay with 2008 over W7 then please shout!  I've been running workstation 2008 for the last year or so and it's been a really sweet experience.  I'm hoping for good things from W7 and am looking forward to again working with an OS that my users will be using.

Yeah, I installed the wireless feature, that works great. Didn't seem to effect BT though.

I went the same road, installing 2008R2. However, as soon as I went 64-bit, I realized that lots of my C++ code has to be redone :)

Did you figure out a way to get hibernate to work?  That was one of your main reasons to upgrade correct?  While I like Server 2008 R2 as a workstation OS on my laptop, I have accidentally shoved my laptop into the case while running.  I was lucky I didn't burn it up.  You know how when meetings run over and there are people waiting on you to shut down the OS.  That sucks!  I don't see why Microsoft can't get Hyper-V to hibernate.  Seems like it would be as simple as save to disk and then hibernate the OS as usual.

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For my laptop I am using server 2008 as OS. The main reason is Hyper V, for every different project I

For over a year I have been using Server 2008, 64 bits, as OS for my laptop . The main reason for this