B# .NET Blog

Yesterday, my 7200 RPM harddisk (Hitachi TravelStar 60 GB) arrived for my laptop. A welcome relief. Performance is far better than with the old harddisk, and it was the ideal occasion for me to have a reinstall of my OS. Beside of that, by moving from 40 GB to 60 GB I can finally have two partitions on my system again (and I still have another harddisk for demos). The problem (if it should be called a problem after all) is that for a 'standard installation' I require over 30 GB (Windows Server 2003 OS, Visual Studio 6, Visual Studio .NET 2003, Office tools, SQL Server 2000, some betas including Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005, Express Tools, etc etc). The secondary partition is likely to become a Windows XP Professional or Windows Longhorn installation.

A tip when you're running Windows Server 2003 on a laptop is to disable the Indexing service to save harddisk load. On Windows XP it seems that this service is disabled by default, whileas (after adding the appropriate server roles) on Windows Server 2003 it is enabled. As I posted before, SP1 RC1 for Windows Server 2003 is a great innovation as well (I can finally use WPA on my laptop to connect to my WLAN). Unfortunately, BlueTooth support is still not present (as far as I'm aware of) which would be the only reason for my to have Windows XP on the system as well (demos with PocketPC development).

A couple of days ago I started playing with the Windows XP Embedded platform builder etc and Windows CE 5.0 development (only experiments right now) to create a stripped-down OS for Windows Media, internet gateways and thin client support. If you want to start playing around with these technologies I recommend to check out Mike Hall's demos on http://msdn.microsoft.com/embedded/getstart/basics/default.aspx. To get the software, browse to http://www.windowsembeddedkit.com where you can grab the latest versions of the Windows Embedded technologies.