You are missing some critical details about this. How many transactions with this database are going per minute/hour/day? If this is a fairly basic SQL instance, I don't see the point of your fail over scenario. Simply create some jobs to run backups every few hour or half-hour (storing transaction logs and such) and roll that over to the "desktop" on a share or something. Obviously money is the issue for you, so don't make it so complicated you can't afford someone else to come in and fix things if you get stuck during production.

I personally feel if they held off and introduced Windows 95 with the same "upgrades" as Windows 98, it would have been better. I am surprised NT 4.0 was not mentioned. Flame-bait aside, I used that before I went to Windows 95, and I personally had a better overall experience. All I did was do term papers, go on a few BBS's and my system really was fine doing next to nothing. Everything since then has been pretty much a fix upon a fix IMHO. I haven't really "experienced" much of an improvement, and the GUI has generally looked the same since I was at NT 4.0 give or take a few modifications here and there. I went OSX a few months back, and that works for me too. It seems whenever I introduce games to any environment I am in, that's when things get unstable. Since I used to work for a gaming company, I generally blame the game makers themselves for not doing a thorough enough QA process before a release, but I understand ultimately a lot of things get fixed after a few patches. Windows 95 pretty much brought over the Windows games (more than they had ever been), so I guess I can agree. XBOX 360 is doing alright, so maybe that's why it's Bill Gate's high point. I say stick to a console for games, though.