Home lab advice

Spike12

Hi everyone,

I'm going to be working on a couple MS certifications in the coming months, and I'm looking for some advice on creating a home lab system.

I'd like to stay within a budget of $500-$600 and I had my eye on a Dell Inspiron 660 (not the mini tower) or an XPS 8500 (around $650). If the Inspiron 600 could do the job, I would rather go that route to save some bucks, as I can always upgrade it later.

I'm open to suggestions, including other brands.

Thanks in advance!

seth479

Does your current computer not have the specs to run Virtual Machines? If it does that would be the cheapest and easiest way to go, install Windows 7 and then use it to go along with the material. If you want to get a good grasp on imaging and deploying maybe even install Windows Server 2008 and you can play around with WDS, WSUS and other roles to get a grasp on them. My virtual lab was mainly Server 2008 R2 and 2 Win7 Ultimate clients and I played with Active Directory, GPO, WSUS, WDS, DHCP and DNS roles and it was fun and I got a beginning grasp on some of the SA stuff.

If you're set on getting another physical machine, the 660 would probably work for you.