Stick with Windows 7 in my opinion (which you can still buy). It will be supported until at least January 2020. Windows Server just introduces services and features you're probably never going to use. I run Windows Server on a server here which does some RADIUS auth./Certificate Services/Active Directory stuff and it's still overkill. It won't necessarily offer you any more stability. With Windows (depending on the version), proper hardware is the key to stability, not the version of OS you're running*.
If you're having issues with stability or uptime, it's not Windows 7 that's causing you dramas, take a look at your hardware. It might not be faulty, just a little bit crap.
* Unless you're running Windows 95a, Millennium Edition, Vista, 8.x... then you're on your own.
I am having no stability/uptime issues, Windows 7 is running fine, but it's hindered by it's Vista origins. I like the idea of upgrading to Windows 10 because it's a faster operating system, but I don't want all the bloaty crap that comes with it like Cortana, and I don't want all the stupid monitoring crap.
But I pulled the trigger, and thankfully I manage to not pull the trigger to my head while doing this.
Man do I got a story to tell.
So, installing Server 2016, not as easy as you might think, at least not for me.
Long story short, I have DVD+RWs. That's it, I don't have USB drives, I just don't got any, need to rectify that in the future.
And Server 2016 doesn't FIT onto a DVD (over 5GB in size). So I thought I might be able to chuck some files off the ISO to make it lighter. (Btw I got the system off Microsoft Imagine, didn't steal notin)
yea, everything is stored in an installation image too big to fit on a DVD.
So, ha, ha, haaaa... I thought if I don't have a flash drive, and a DVD won't fit... What sort of bootable storage device can I use to put the ISO image on and install Server 2016?
A hard drive!
So I gutted my media center computer that has been sitting ignored for ages (Sadly) and grabbed a drive that I never hooked up and had just thrown in. Windows didn't want to partition, or do anything with it, and it was a spare bad blocks drive, so I am assuming it's dead.
Next drive lucky, time for a 300 GB WD Caviar Blue with bad blocks, but still working. One partition later, and I could use it. So I used a tool called YUMI to "Burn" the ISO on there with a strange pocketed bootloader... Yea I don't know what the hell it's doing. I can't use DVD burning software as it only works for optical media, I can't use Win32DiskImager because A. It doesn't work with fixed drives and B. I don't f**king trust it (I lost two computers to it, never try to write a floppy with that software, it will mistake your C drive for the floppy, MS-DOS on an i7 was funny for a few seconds), so that worked fine.
Booted up, and started the installer
I want to dualboot, and I am not going to take no for an answer here. Windows Server 2016 setup has the option of, bin the Win7 installation, or throw me on a drive and see what happens.
I chose the latter, and it installed on a second partition on my SSD. But one reboot later, and it wouldn't boot in. I thought, Ahh I'll just add it to the Windows 7 bootloader.
Yeea, I used EasyBCD, added it as an entry, and it complained that winload.exe's digital signature couldn't be verified.
No matter what I did, including trying to swap both the file and signature of Windows 7's winload.exe, to no luck, until I decided I was going to try to repair the bootloader or whatever I could try on the install disk's repair utilities.
So booted that up, and lo and behold, it didn't go into the installer, but the Server 2016 installation! The bootloader on the install disk allowed me to enter both Windows 7 and Server 2016.
So I decided to not bother messing with anything else, and that I am going to leave the 300GB hard drive in and just use that bootloader to switch into either system, with the accidental perk of having the setup utility incase something goes to pot with my install.
Not gonna mess with anything else, I am sure I made more errors along the way, and there probably was a stupidly easy solution to all of it, but that doesn't matter now. It is working, and that is what I need it to do.
So now the question is, is this viable? I think it may be, but time will tell, but one thing is for sure.
I.E. on Server operating systems is LITERALLY unusable. I can't even install google chrome.
Cheers.