A few weeks ago Snagy (don’t worry, he’s not always as serious as he looks in that photo on his blog) got a new laptop - an extremely large and amazingly spec’d 17” XPS (raid, SLI video cards…a laptop!). At the same time he forwarded around a great offer Dell were running here in .au - 25% off XPS laptops over $2500. Fast-forward a few weeks and I now have a brand new XPS 1530 with 4GB of ram, a dual-core 2.6 GHz CPU and an 8600M GT GPU, good enough to score a sweet 5.1 on the Windows Experience Index out-of-the-box (the same score as Snagy’s SLI monster). And then I went and installed Server 2008 x64 on it.
I spent plenty of time getting Vista beta2 running on my previous notebook melty, and I’ve been running Vista x64 on two of my machines at home, and one at work so I’m able to tolerate (and even relish) a small amount of driver pain. After a day of concerted effort about half my devices work properly, and I’m generally lovin’ life on my new rig.
The question I have is - should I install hyper-V? It gives me great virtualization, a feature I don’t use _that_often now that I’m deeply in WPF land where running on real GPUs is much better than virtualized ones, but which I’m keen to play with a bit more. I lose fairly important laptop features like “sleep” and “hibernate” in exchange. Should I stick with Server 2008 (to break the Vista homogenity) or roll back to Vista x64? Regardless of the answers I’m hoping the current state-of-affairs won’t last tooo long, and I’ll have a Windows7 drop in the next few months. Leon is indeed right in that there aren’t too many original ideas out on the internet. While I originally thought running hyper-V on a laptop was a little unusual there are lots of people doing it.
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(And I’ve left Hyper-V off - I like to just open the lid and start working.)
You can turn on desktop experience and get full WPF power…as a matter of fact there’s a website dedicated to user 2008 as a Workstation
http://www.win2008workstation.com/wordpress/
However, if you use your laptop "on the road" (so to speak), it becomes a real drag when you have to do the full bootup - which includes further power drain - just to check email/rss/etc in a ‘remote’ location.
That..and c’mon, you lose the snipping tool in WS2008!