My main server got its system disk scrambled over thanksgiving break due to some power issues. I am not sure what exactly happened as I was a couple of hundred miles away but I came home to clocks blinking and computers shut down. My media center unfortunately lost its DVD drive. One of my laptops lost its power supply. Most oddly, my server’s system disk got discombobbled. This is odd because I have a nice UPS on the machine and I wouldn’t have expected the failure. Especially since I formatted the disk and ran patterns on it and it ran fine.
Anyway, the machine was running Windows Server 2008 and I had been wanting to upgrade to Windows Server 2008 R2 on it so I could stumble against any changes etc at home instead of in front of customers. After a couple of days now I have noticed that the server is very distinctly moving faster. I don’t know what or why or how, but it is definitely faster. So some change somewhere in the OS is just making it run more efficiently and I love that. Especially in this world of newer means fatter and more bloated and slower. I got this same result when I upgraded a couple of my test machines from Windows Vista to Windows 7 as well. I didn’t really expect it when moving from Windows Server 2008 to 2008 R2, but I am thankful that it is working out that way. 
joe
