Crossing my fingers...

...and diving into upgrading my Windows Server 2003, Web Edition RC2 to RTM. I wouldn't be worried about it at all but for the fact that I'm running Win2K3 in a VMWare v3.1.1 virtual machine, and Windows Server 2003 is only provided experimental support in that version. It worked fine for RC1, but locked up hard when attempting a fresh install of RC2. I managed to get RC2 running under VMWare by installing RC1 and then upgrading RC1 to RC2, so I'm going to try the same trick with the RTM version. If that doesn't work, then I'll pave the VM and try installing from scratch.

Unfortunately, it's not clear yet whether VMWare is planning to support Win2K3 in their 3.x product, so I may have to upgrade to 4.x (currently in beta) if neither an upgrade or fresh install works on 3.x. I'll report back with the results!

As an aside for folks who've never used VMWare, if you are often in need of a platform for beta-testing, and don't want to jeopardize your day-to-day work platform, VMWare is worth a look. It's definitely cheaper than buying a new machine for testing betas, but there are a couple of caveats. You'll need at least 4-6gigs of HD space for each VM to comfortably hold both OS and whatever software you're beta testing (particularly if you're testing multiple betas), and you should add as much RAM to your computer as it will hold, since that will definitely improve the performance of any VMs you're running.