Article ID: 829967 - Last Review: March 17, 2008 - Revision: 9.1

Release notes for the preliminary release of Windows Server 2008

These release notes contain important information that was not available when the product documentation was written for Windows Server 2008. Windows Server 2008 was distributed at the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) in April, 2005.

Unless stated otherwise, all the information that this article includes applies to Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 for Itanium-based systems, and Windows Server 2008 for 64-bit extended systems. These release notes supplement the documentation on the Windows Server 2008 CD-ROM.

System requirements

To install Windows Server 2003, the computer must have a DVD drive and must meet the following minimum requirements:

233 megahertz (MHz) processor
256 megabytes (MB) of RAM
6 GB of available hard disk space during installation

To determine whether the computer meets these requirements, follow these steps:

Click Start, right-click My Computer and then click Properties.
Click the General tab, if the General tab is not already selected.
View the information listed under Computer to see the processor speed and RAM of your computer.

Important We recommend that you determine whether any one or more of these notes apply to your specific scenario.

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MORE INFORMATION

In this preliminary release of Windows Server 2008, the Print, Imaging, Fax, and Color feature sets are not included in Windows Server 2008.
This release of Windows Server 2008 includes a Beta 1 release of the Microsoft .NET Framework version 2.0 from June, 2004. Therefore, many of the recent pre-release products that are based on more recent versions of .NET Framework 2.0 will not work on this release. These issues will be addressed in future releases of Windows Server 2008. Windows Server 2008 Beta1 will include the Microsoft .NET Framework version 2.0 Beta2. The following products are affected by this issue:
- Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2 and recent Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Community Technology Previews (CTPs).
  
  To work around this issue, install Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 to do development on this release.
- Avalon
- Indigo
- Microsoft SQL Server 2005 CTPs
In this preliminary release of Windows Server 2008, the Windows File Protection (WFP) feature is not enabled. Any user who has administrator permissions or and program that is running with administrator permissions can overwrite or change operating system files. We strongly recommend that users run as a Least-Privilege User account (LUA).

This WFP feature will be enabled in Windows Server 2008 Beta 1.
MSN Messenger 6.2 cannot sign in when you use the Sign me in automatically check box. When you try to sign-in to any passport account that has the Sign me in automatically check box checked, you will receive the following error message code:

0x80004005
To work around this problem, clear the Sign me in automatically check box.
In this preliminary release of Windows Server 2008, the explorer functionality of ActiveSync will not work. The problem applies to Microsoft ActiveSync version 3.7.1, 3.8, and 4.0.
In this preliminary release of Windows Server 2008, HTML Help does not function correctly. For example, you cannot open the HTML Help by pressing F1 or by using the Help menu. Also, you cannot open a .chm file by double-click the file.

To work around this problem, copy itircl.dll and itss.dll from the %windir% folder to the %windir%\system32 folder.
Office 2003 is unable to detect the Windows Server 2008 Rights Management System (RMS) Client when you try to use the Windows Server 2008 RMS to protect Microsoft Office 2003 documents. To resolve the RMS issue, apply the hotfix that is described in the following Microsoft Knowledge Base article:
897577 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/897577/ ) You receive an "Another version of this product is installed" error message when you try to help protect or to open an IRM document in an Office 2003 program