I am finding that the forum search function finds posts containing some search terms, but not others.

For example, when I search for "panchromatic" the result is zero found (apart from this thread), and when I search for "beale" the result is an old thread from 2015 but the recent one is not found (again, apart from this thread).

Search options used: All Forums & Subjects and Comments.

It's probably not the only thing that needs looking at. I've noticed the spellchecker is missing some of the common mistakes that get made despite the code for it not changing in years. I need to shut down the server for a while this Saturday Night for about ten minutes to do some maintenance. Hopefully a reboot is all that is required.

How did the reboot go?

It didn't - work got in the way of things this weekend. I will be out of town this coming weekend so I'll have to do it one night through this week.

There could be a new server on the way too, in the next few months, as this one is about six years old now.

this one is about six years old now.

In June the PC running XP-Pro I'm on here will turn 10 years old. It has run 24 x 7 since I bought it. Apart from the occasional vacuum out, only brownouts and blackouts have taken it off the air, plus a fan replacement in the power supply -- but that was only to install a quieter one.

Viva la Gigabyte!

I'm in the throes of arranging to get a replacement built -- another Gigabyte -- which will run Windows 7 64-bit. (No Windows 10 for me!)

I always used Gigabyte motherboards in home brewed machines I used to build. You could call me a believer. Unless you already have Windows 7 or can lay your hands on a surplus OEM version you might be out of luck there and don't forget, it has gone out of mainstream support now which means only essential security related updates are available and it will go out of extended support (including Windows Update altogether) on 14th January, 2020.

I'm on Windows 10 here and am quite happy with it. There's definitely versions that are much worse.

I have Win 7 Pro and Office Pro in a sealed boxes, NOS from a supplier. Microsoft support dates never bothered me in the slightest. I used Win 95 for ages and I'd happily go on using XP-Pro forever, but I need to go to 64 bit for various applications now.

Microsoft is having a hard time getting corporates to adopt Win 10. In fact some have paid for extended support of XP!

By the time I'm through with Win 7, MS will be onto some bizarre new version.

This server is running Windows 2008. I'd like to update to the latest version, mainly for security reasons, though at over $1,000 for Windows 2012, this will have to do for another couple of years. And, because there's two servers, that means two licences.

It's fairly normal for businesses to lag behind domestic consumers. When you have thousands of computers to upgrade it is an expensive process. The other issue is need. If Windows 7 does what a business wants, which is usually only e-mail, word processing and spreadsheets then an OS upgrade can't be justified in the boardroom. Most householders will upgrade because they want to, not because they need any new features that may be available. In my case I upgraded because I bought a new laptop and the OS upgrade from 8.1 to 10 was free and there was no way I'd stay on 8.1. I too, would have gone back to 7 if 10 wasn't available.

As you would likely be aware, most severs like yours would be running a flavour of Unix with Apache on it.

The Microsoft tax is not popular out there!

It was like that once. With the advent of .NET, many have flocked to Windows servers. System administrators traditionally like operating systems without graphic interfaces on them as they consume memory and CPU resources but there is a law they obey more than anything else - never go cross-platform. This means never use Windows applications on a Unix server and never use Unix applications on a Windows server. EG: You can run Apache on Windows but it won't perform as well as IIS. It will work much better on FreeBSD, its native platform.

The other thing is that servers have come a long way in the last ten years. They are much cheaper than they used to be. A $40,000 server made ten years ago doesn't have the horses this laptop of mine puts out. A baseline rack server made now can be had for $2,000.00. At the other end of the spectrum, not sure of the price, you can have something like a HP DL785 with four 3GHz eight core AMD processors, 512GB of RAM and 12 10,000RPM 2TB hard drives - that will cost a lot of money but has more than enough oomph to run Windows 200 times over.

I used to run seven servers in my rack (the one pictured on the about page) and they all ran a mix of operating systems. Windows 2000 Server was on most of them but there was also FreeBSD, OpenBSD and Mandrake Linux. Due to the electricity price increases we've had since all that was set up I've rolled back to two Windows machines and there is one other advantage - not having to remember all those commands to do simple things.

I've been busy tonight but there is good news:-

1. Front cooling fan on the server has been replaced - it was dead and with no dust on the blades it has probably been dead for a while.
2. Windows updates done.
3. Bug for Forum 14 destroyed. Search now works correctly.
4. Server rebooted and all is well.

Thanks