I just took delivery of my new work/personal laptop this past week and spent a few days getting it setup just right.  For some background and for those of you who think I am crazy here were my requirements:

1. Must be a laptop, need to travel and for school
2. I like to develop, needs to be fast
3. I like to be creative, needs some graphics and CPU power
4. I like to play with new software and server stuff, needs a Hypervisor
5. I like docking stations too!

So with all of that said I bought a Dell M6500, you can take a look at the base specs at the Dell site, but trust me, don’t buy this monster without working with a Business Sales Rep!

I ended up getting the following:

1. Intel i7 890xm CPU
2. 12GB 1333 GHz RAM
3. nVidia 3800m (1GB Ded)
4. Dual 500GB HDD in RAID0
5. Docking Station of course!
6. The others goodies Dell has to offer

I had a copy of Windows Server 2008 R2 laying around and that is how this post starts…

If you read the comments about the 6500 many people complain about attempting to convert the laptop into a server and run into problems when running Hyper-V on the laptop.  Dell obviously does not support running a server OS on a laptop but there are lots of resources out there.

When I first went away to college I did run Windows Server 2003 on my desktop because I wanted to learn more about IIS6 at the time as well as beginning my foray into ASP development at the time.  Back then getting a server OS running as a workstation was HARD to say the least.  It never worked quite right and programs always picked up on it being a server and not a client so needless to say I eventually moved back to XP at the time.

I had faith in Microsoft and thought I would give 2008 R2 a chance, surely they had made some improvements.

I was right! I was able to setup 2008 R2 and so far everything has worked great.  I have the desktop experience features installed which makes working with the OS a little nicer.  There are a few gotchas but I managed to find a great website complete with automated installers to help out with a lot of the problems.  You can find it here.

So far the experience has been great and I have been lucky enough not to run into the problem many users have talked about where the laptop will lock up when the Hypervisor is running.  No BSODs here!

Feel free to post questions or comments, I’ll try to answer back as quickly as possible.

-Brent

Just published out version 1.2 of uManage.  It now includes a little more automated setup process as well as the new Admin Portal which as of right now only allows the system administrator to view and change some system settings.  The next release (~ 1.5) will really have a lot of the new functionality that will start to make the product really usable in an organization for managing users.  I got a request from one of the previous releases for some screenshots.  I added more to CodePlex and will include them here as well.  If you have an Active Directory test environment the app takes less than 10 minutes to have up and running, so just give it a shot, worst comes to worse and you remove it.

Check it out now: http://umanage.codeplex.com

Check back here for more in the future!

-Brent

I was watching a show sometime later this evening and the first one has hit.  Our favorite little PC girl is back and she demos the new OS in this pretty cool little video.

Cool stuff!  Oh and Windows 7 so far is most everything they claim.

-Brent

So I decided that since I have now installed Windows 7 and have been very pleasantly surprised that I would share my experiences with the world in the event people are looking for something like this.  Before I jump in to the changes in the built-in calculator I would like to provide a little more information on this series so people don’t get confused.

1. I am using Windows 7 RTM (Final Release) using 64-bit hardware a big CPU and lots of RAM.
2. However I am also using Windows 7 on my old Dell Inspiron 2200 with a very old and small CPU and 512 MB of RAM and it runs fine!
3. I am testing Ultimate and Enterprise editions
4. I got them from MSDN so no, they are not yet available to the public.

So there is Part 1: Calculator.  Look for more in the coming days and weeks ahead.  So far so good!

-Brent