dual-boot or vmware

Hi everyone,

Well, I'm moving on to 290 after passing 270 last December (thanks to you and techexams' help).

I'm using a lone, old laptop that's got 512MB RAM and about 10Gig free harddisk space at the moment. CPU is a mobile AMD Athlon XP-M 2000+ and I am running XP Home.

I've just downloaded the eval copy of Windows Server 2003 from MS. For review/simulation purposes, should I just install it in a separate partition and dual boot? or use VMWare such as I did with XP Pro?

As always, I'd appreciate your comments.

Thanks,

Bojo

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ladiesman217

i suggest you use vmware to simulate a working virtual network environment between your client (windows xp) and your DC (server 2003). Dual boot configuration is not suitable to setup a lab, since your limited to work on a stand alone OS at a time.

dynamik

ladiesman217 wrote:

i suggest you use vmware to simulate a working virtual network environment between your client (windows xp) and your DC (server 2003). Dual boot configuration is not suitable to setup a lab, since your limited to work on a stand alone OS at a time.

+1

You should also bump up your ram and get an external drive for your VMs. You can probably make significant improvements for $100-150. I just bought two gb of ram for $60 for one of our laptops at work (and two gigs for $47 for my machine at home -- maybe DDR3 is driving down the cost of older memory).

bojo387

dynamik wrote:

ladiesman217 wrote:

i suggest you use vmware to simulate a working virtual network environment between your client (windows xp) and your DC (server 2003). Dual boot configuration is not suitable to setup a lab, since your limited to work on a stand alone OS at a time.

+1

You should also bump up your ram and get an external drive for your VMs. You can probably make significant improvements for $100-150. I just bought two gb of ram for $60 for one of our laptops at work (and two gigs for $47 for my machine at home -- maybe DDR3 is driving down the cost of older memory).

Thanks. I might indeed need to consider a separate drive. I've read that to speed up/optimize vmware, it is best to store the virtual machines on a separate (physical) drive. So any usb drive will work instead of an internal HD?

dynamik

That's correct. You might not get the performance of an internal drive, but once it's booted up, it's really not disk-intensive. Laptop drives are typical slow anyway, so it'll probably be on par with what you're used to. If you don't have usb 2.0, you might be hurting though.

bojo387

Great, that is the way to go then.

Thanks!