Ahh. I remember buying - wiht my own money! - W2K. I think it was about £80.
At the time, it was probably the best PC OS outthere. It really was good.
OK, cmdshell was shit.
But it managed the new multicore CPUs pretty well.
I avoid MS consumer OSes. Not worth the hassle.
Next and last impressive server OS was WS2008R2. Well done on that. Then pwoerhsell was starting to emerge.
Sticker - £600.
After that - WS2012 - a server OS with a GUI from a mobile phone. No thanks.
Sticker price for a system - MSSQL was a few 1000.
Id learnt my lession by WS2008R2. I stoppedu sing MS server unless I had to.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
