Running 2k8 & Hyper-V on a cheapo laptop

After doing a little homework, I recently bought a cheapo £500 (Philips branded) laptop from PC World UK (PC-City in other countries). According to Intel, the Core 2 Duo CPU that was in it did have the Hyper-V instructions, but I did not know whether the BIOS would support Hyper-V. The laptop was bough  purely in the hope of running Hyper-V

Using a Dell Win2008 64 bit DVD I attempted an install of Win2008, to my delight it worked - 60 day evaluation, (which can be extended twice before it falls over!). I had to do a fair bit of fannying about looking for the 64 bit drivers (I didn't think it was worth asking for advice in the shop - the laptop a Philips badged Advent )

Anyway, I installed the RTM version of Hyper-V, downloading it on the day of release! Again it worked (except the WiFi card). I connected a WinXP VHD from a Virtual PC / Virtual Server 2005, I use for testing. At first I had difficulty getting the new child Video and Network card running correctly, then XP insisted on re-activation - which worked over the Internet.

I have spent a fair bit of time screwing around with the system, and it runs quite well on 2 GM RAM. I still really dislike the mess and bloat of Win2008 / Vista, and am not convinsed it's the future - but my experience has been very positive. One thing that also pleased me was I was able to shove Win2008 / HyperV on the same 25 GB C: partition as WinXP and Win2003 installations.

These O/S's were installed to c:\winXP and C:\Win2k3 respectively, the "document and settings" folders moved to the windows (profiles) folders  as WinNT4.0. (using an answer file)  C:\Program Files were frigged to c:\ProgFXP\ and C:\ProgF2k3\ using Resplendant Registrar to edit the registry. The real tricky bit was going back to the old Windows 2k3 bootloader (NTLDR, NTDetect.com and boot.ini). With a sneaky boot sector rip off and edit, and the help of Norton Ghost / Barts bebuilder boot USB stick (a few uses actually!) I can now sucessfully boot to any of the three O/S's, leaving a blank D: drive for all my VHD's and CD /DVD ISO images.

All in all a worthwhile investment of £500. If anyone else is interested I'm happy to dig out the model number (if it is still sold)

That sounds like a real bargain of a system. I never thought of having 3 operating systems co-exist like that on a single drive... I doubt I'd do that to a production system as well, just in case it screws up - or in case some installer screws up.

In terms of the Windows 2008 bloat, why not run Server Core only?

Hi Craig,

Personally I don't see the point of Win2008 Server Core, it strikes me as a backward step (coming from Microsoft). Unix people are pretty farmilair with running nerdy CLI commands. Anyone using Unix / Linux (even newbies) will likely want to have a fairly good grasp of CLI, and the way that the legicy system is laid out. On the other hand, Windows has had a GUI most of it's life, with very little need for CLI other than for very basic networking call Netstat, Nbtstat, ipconfig, ping and net start / stop etc. I can't see the point in having to learn a set of hateful MS commands, just to save a bit of disk space. It's argued that "Core" also reduces the attack surface - though personally, in some ways,  I think it opposite. MS software should be better than that anyway.

My feeling is that Core Server has been designed as pervers competition with VMware's ESX CLI server - which usually comes with a fat yearly subscription. I don't think Core Server will catch, and if anything will disapear, as many other Microsoft oddities.

I tend to concur with what you say except for the attack surface. The attack surface is definitely reduced through the reduction in system components, however I'd have liked to have seen perhaps a straight text based PowerShell UI under and only that - not in a window, no windows at all. It would feel more real - or would that be more Linux/Unix like?

Then on the other hand look at what the Linux guys are doing going all graphical.