How to use ML350 G3 as a worksation

[Nancy R. Dib]

Is it possible to reformat and use this box as a workstation? If so, where do I find instructions? It has Win 2000 Server installed.

[Paul Wheeler_2 · Accepted solution]

If the machine was Windows/2000 compliant then you should be able to install either W2K Server or Workstation as required.

However, there is probably little point in doing this as:-

W2K Server and Workstation are basically the same product, at least on the smaller versions. W2K Server just has more utilities and management software, plus the licencing configuration to run as a server.
It is a different situation if it has an Enterprise product or one of its variant installed, as these will be orientated towards managing large numbers of users.

There is unlikely to be any performance gain with just a single user on W2K Server over W2K Workstation.

Applications that will install on W2K Workstation will usually install on W2K Server without problem and run in single user mode.

Applications that have server/network licenced versions will usually install/run the single user product on W2K Server, but will usually prohibit any further user accounts from running that application. Anti-virus, database and messaging applications are usually the ones with which this is most apparent.

If it has multiple processors installed, W2K Workstation will not run anyway as it was only designed/licenced for a 1/2 processor system and it performs this check during initial install.

The real decision depends on what your objective in installing W2K Workstation would be.

Finally, W2K will only support IE6 and .NET release 2, so you may find that some web application won't be supported or won't run very well in the browser.

If you have to replace it, your choice is really a Linux variant, or Windows/XP if the hardware will support it and all the drivers are available. Again it depends on what your objective is in doing so.

[Nancy R. Dib]

Thank you very much - I am interested in installing Windows/XP to use this CPU only to connect to an IBM AS400 and send/receive emails. It is so large and heavy, but still runs well, we would like to put it to use. There is nothing on it that we want to keep, so I was hoping we could just reformat the hard drive and install XP. It has (3) 36.4 drives. I was hoping to put XP on one of them and only use that one. I am not concerned about backup of this drive. When I tried to install XP, I get a message telling me it would not install over W2K but rather install along side of it. I answered okay, and then proceded to get several "I386\..." files that it could not find. I was given the option to skip, ignore, or try again. I skipped them. I have not let the installation complete in hope of getting an answer on this site.
Thank you again.

[Shoghi Martinez G.]

The Workstation/Server difference is the operating system on the box.

When you are booting with the XP installation CD delete the partition before going to install, if you get some error copying files, may be some sort of media problem (XP CD) or the CD-ROM drive itself.

HTH
Shoghi.