Microsoft ended Windows Server 2003’s Mainstream Support on July 13, 2010, and Extended Support on July 14, 2015. This means it would no longer provide security updates, technical support, or software updates for this server-based operating system.
Windows Server 2003 is probably my favourite Windows release. I never liked Windows XP, and Server 2003, with its updated codebase and various fixes compared to XP, provided a more solid alternative at the time. There was this whole cottage industry of people aiding each other in converting Windows Server 2003 into a more desktop-friendly operating system through reactivating services, installing additional components, applying registry changes, and so on. It was a bit of work post-install, but once done, you had a more stable, more solid, and safer “version” of Windows XP.
At least, that was the theory. I have no idea if this was actually true, or if a fully updated Windows XP installation was, in fact, functionally equivalent and that Server 2003 provided zero material benefit.
Hah! I remember those days. I even managed to get a six months trial version of Windows 2003 to do it with. In the end I went back to Windows XP which I owned an upgrade copy of from the day of release. It was also about this time I gave up on activating it and sought out the infamous FCKGW key version and started using tools like nLite to really take it to a whole ‘nother level with slipstream customer packages. Those were some amazing days.
And then I met Ubuntu and fell in love with Gnome 2.x….
It was mostly true, I did it back in the day with a valid Server 2003 license I got from college. I was taking networking courses and the instructor told us if we had a spare PC at home we could install Server 2003 on it and replicate our in-class work, and explore the OS on our own time if we wanted. Of course I did, and I actually repurposed my recently retired BeOS machine, a PII Slot 1 workstation, and it worked great. After the course was over I tried out the “convert Server to Workstation” shenanigans, and it indeed made for a great workstation OS with the appropriate tweaks. The only downside was that gaming was not all that great; the correct drivers for my GPU didn’t exist for the Server OS and trying the XP drivers only resulted in blue screens when launching anything that used 3D rendering. I did finally manage to get a Matrox card to work properly, but it wasn’t fast enough for the games I wanted to play, so I ended up going back to XP proper and my original GPU from there.
It wasn’t too difficult to get some (not all) 2k/XP drivers to install on 2k3 – the most troublesome were GPU drivers for sure.