Windows 2003 still impresses me. It's very stable. Honestly, I think that it's an incredible OS. I use Windows 2003 Professional (thanks neowin!) on my workstation ... and the only reason I haven't switched to using it on my laptop is fear of some backwards compat for games and the likes. It's faster than WinXP and seems as stable (or more) than Windows 2000/XP.

Another technology that I think is amazing is Terminal Services/RemoteDesktops. The ability to work remotely on a machine makes server management a breeze. Actually, I probably spend as much time (or more) in a RemoteDesktop a day as I do on my local desktop. At work I just use my personal laptop to RemoteDesktop Connect into my super powerful WorkStation... from which I spend a good deal of time connecting to servers using the Remote Desktops Manager -- an MMC wrapper that replaces the TerminalServices MMC.

Here's what I find disturbing/annoying however: if I go in to Start > Program Files > Accessories > Communications and launch a new Remote Desktop Connection I DO have the option of specifying whether I want to connect to the printers on the remote machine or not. (I STILL don't understand why that is ON by default though). What BUGS though is that if you use the RemoteDesktop MMC, you don't even have the option to turn that absurdity off (short of tweaking the file by hand). There's nothing like looking at the System EVENT log of a remote/production server and seeing scads of Full-Blown errors caused by a failure of a WEBSERVER or SQLSERVER to properly install a printer for a user who has connected to the box for admin purposes.

It's too bad there isn't more control over this functionality... even the ability to turn it off by tweaking some of the connection's properties would be acceptible. Oh well. Great tools, just perplexed on this one point, and I still think that the MMC framework is to blame.