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Anyway<\/em>, where this is all going is here: no more installing development tools or random crap on my main machine. It all goes into Virtual PCs now. I’ve created a couple of “base” VPC builds:<\/p>\n I’ll create more base builds when they become necessary (a Visual Studio 2005 build will happen very soon). Each project I’m working on now has its own virtual machine, cloned from one of these base builds. No more worrying about software I’ve installed for one project interfering with another, because they each have a whole machine for themselves. The virtual machines are portable, so I can bring them with me on my laptop; and if I need to reinstall Windows on my main machine, I no longer have to worry about all the pain and hassle of getting my development environment up and running again, because it’s as simple as grabbing a copy from my backup disk.<\/p>\n It’s very, very cool, and I should have done this a long time ago.<\/p>\n The only downside is that my Windows PC is a couple of years old now (Athlon 2500+, 1GB RAM), and using Visual Studio in the virtual machines is definitely slower than working on the host hardware. Not intolerably slow, but slow enough to make me wish for a multi-processor or dual core workstation upgrade, with another Gig of memory, so I could have more than one VM open at the same time. But this would also mean getting a new motherboard, which then means a new video card, and it all starts to get expensive rather quickly.<\/p>\n Never mind. It’s good enough for now, and it is more than worth it to avoid the hassle of software interference.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Although I’m still enjoying my Mac, I’m spending most of my time on my Windows machine at the moment, because that’s where I’m doing most of my current development work. And after having merely dabbled with virtualization technology for a while, I’ve now made the full and complete move into the world of virtual machines … <\/p>\n\n