Syringe.Net.Nz - New Machine Build: Blogging it

Thursday, August 16, 2007

So I'm building a new machine at the moment. I've moved from my Asus Lambourghini to a Dell Inspiron 1520. It's not really an upgrade... more of a crossgrade. While I've gone from a top of the line Consumer Notebook (the Asus) to a standard consumer grade notebook (the Dell) I have gained a slightly nicer Graphics Card and I now have 4GB of RAM.

I'm taking a VERY different approach to building this machine. I am going to try a while of Virtualizing almost everything.

So I'm going to run a VERY lean and mean install on the metal then I'll run VMs for all my dev work. This is a major move away for me as for a long time I've very much been one to basically Frankenbuild a machine with Beta and Alpha everything. Then I'd rebuild it every six months or so.

On this machine I'm looking to document exactly what I install and to keep it to a bare minimum. Currently on the metal I'll be running

Vista Home Premium (I couldn't get Ultimate to install as it kept bluescreening on startup so I went back to the recovery disks)
Office 2007 Ultimate
Visio 2007 Pro
MSN Messenger
Lightroom
Photoshop
WinRAR
Polar Performance Pro (Sport Watch Software)
IE7
VMWare Workstation (If all goes well I'll look to move my entire approach across to Windows 2008 Server Core and WSV once the Beta is out but for the moment I need the USB and Multimonitor support of VMWare- and of course VPC doesn't run on Vista Home!!!!!)

Then I'm going to virtualize ALL my development and test work. I'll post back here as I go along.

New Machine|Thursday, August 16, 2007 7:38:11 AM UTC|Comments [3]|

Friday, August 17, 2007 2:08:08 AM UTC

Love your style. Good luck with the changeover. Not that you'll need it :)

Andrew Dugdell

Friday, August 17, 2007 8:47:04 AM UTC

Meh, i have never understood people who rebuild a dev machine every 6 months or so, personally i only have to rebuild every two years or so, and that was more due to natural degradation in the environment (like fragmentation etc). I don't really think you will save time by using a VM - by the time you have spent hours going over it making sure it is in a state suitable to be a baseline image, that is equivalent to a couple of rebuilds.

Friday, August 17, 2007 9:06:11 AM UTC

My hope, going forward is that it will not generally be me building the VMs.
For example I ahve grabbed our already sys-prepped Win2k3 Base from Intergen to provide my VS2k5 and VS2k8B2 machines. I already have a XPSP2+VS2k3 machine that I'm pretty happy with.

Chris AUld

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