Building a Lean Development Machine
The time to rebuild my development machine had arrived again. I’ve been running Vista 32 bit for about a year. I was basically happy with Vista as a development machine, but something else had bothered me over the last couple of months. All the mundane crap that was clogging my system. For example, Skype, Trillian, ITunes, Hamachi, PDF readers, MS Office … The list goes on and on…
I want a super lean installation of Windows 2008 Server x64, Visual Studio 2008, Sql Server 2008 x64, TortoiseSVN, VisualSVN, CodeRush and WinMerge.
The choice of Windows 2008 Server is to match our production servers which are running Windows 2008 Server.
So that’s what I did. I installed the very short list of software above. I used windows-server-2008-workstation-converter to make the server more suitable as a workstation. Visual Studio is incredibly fast on the new installation. I have decent hardware, but it is still a notebook. (Some disagree with me that the Dell XPS 1730 is a notebook, but I’ll leave that as a dispute on definition of a notebook :-) )

For a notebook the hardware specs are pretty good.
In addition it has 2 X 200GB 7200rpm HDD running in a RAID0 configuration.
What about all the other software packages? Everything else I installed in a virtual machine running Windows XP Pro. XP running in a VM on Win2k8 x64 on this machine is so fast you don’t even notice it’s running in a virtual machine. Sweet!