Chronicles from Giai

I share a forum after some months and it's not my favourite thing. I report my recent experiences about installation. A couple of days ago I downloaded Windows Server 2003 R2 and succesfully installed it. Right bottom on my desktop screen an icon shows that: Windows Server 2003, Enterprise Edition Evaluation Copy, Build 3790 (Service Pack 1). I guessed it is a copy with already installed its Service Pack 1. Then I searched for possible upgrades in Windows Server 2003 R2 home page and found nothing. I could have stopped here, but I had an already downloaded WindowsServer2003-KB889101-SP1-x86-ENU.exe copy for normal WindowsServer2003 and installed also this Sp. System has installed it without errors and I'm going well. I should have asked an expert before doing that, but I hate to wait for answers: that's why I don't like forums. By the way, can anyone tell me if WindowsServer2003-KB889101-SP1-x86-ENU.exe is good for Windows Server 2003 R2? I can reinstall everything, as I have all downloads on CD-ROM & DVD. Then today I've downloaded Microsoft SQL 2005: 3 hours for 950 MB. I installed succesfully it. I downloaded also Northwind and Pubs database scripts and attached them to SQL 2005. I can browse tables of Northwind and Pubs. One thing: even if online guide is very complete, it takes 10 seconds to load, quite a lot. Another thing: now I find in my computer also a copy of Microsoft Visual Studio 2005, just after having downloaded SQL 2005. Is it a complete version of Microsoft Visual Studio 2005, or what?

I'm glad you were able to install. Sorry that it took so long to download, but we're now bundling more into the product than we were with SQL Server 2000.

For your 10 seconds to load question, we'll need to get an answer from the Database Engine team.

For your question about Microsoft Visual Studio 2005: The edition you get with SQL Server 2005 is really just an empty shell that other components can install into. The Business Intelligence Developer Studio (BIDS) feature in Tools installs itself as a package into Visual Studio. If you don't already have Visual Studio on your machine, the empty Visual Studio shell is installed.

Good luck with everything.

-Jeffrey