One of my collegues at Xero put me onto this tool vlite which helps you build a custom ISO with only the features you need for your vista install.
Nowadays I’m running ubuntu x64 with vmware as my base system and I have a vista running in a vmware workstation virtual machine. I’m using vmware workstation instead of server because it allows me to use dual monitors inside my virtual machine which I think is abslotely fantastic. Thanks to Alex Henderson for pointing that out to me.
My vista has got sql server 2k5 and visual studio 2008 beta 2 installed.
So the stripped down version of vista fits on a cd instead of a dvd and is heaps faster than the regular install of vista. My vista only needs IIS I don’t need all the other stuff it has got.
I hope you will find this as useful as I did when I learnt about this tool.
They recently interviewed a couple of guys about Virtual PC etc. on DotNetRocks – apparently the whole crappy display adapter issue with Virtual PC has been raised numerous times, yet there are still no plans to improve the experience to either support resolutions above 1600×1200, or multiple monitors…
I don’t think MS gets just how annoying this is, I can’t see me every moving back from VMWare Workstation for development until they get it sorted.
I’ve even managed to convert a DBA friend of mine over to running Linux with VMWare and he’s loving it, plus he appears to get much better virtual application performance in Linux then windows i.e. faster disk access etc.
You still planning to move to a Mac?
I don’t feel the urgency to move to mac now that i felt before.. I just ordered some more memory for my dell and I’ll see what the mac guys will do next year when I’m really due for a laptop upgrade.
Thanks a lot for your tip