Perforce is free for small projects and very reliable. Easy to use? I wouldn't say so, until you have some experience with it. I recently updated it and had to mess around with obscure command line options to get it to work again.
I get around the no plugin problem by checking out the entire project before an editing session, then reverting unchanged files after. It's just me working on it, so it makes no difference.
It's fine to have the server and client on the same machine. Installing as a service is convenient because you don't have to start the server manually.
Source Control - Perforce
Perforce is not a good choice for source control. It is intended to be version control for binary assets; like textures and sounds.
For source contol, or version contol in general on text data, use Svn or git.
Perforce's speed comes from it throwing away all the useful features of Svn/git that you need for source control but don't really need for binary assets.
I have installed P4D both locally on a Windows 7 machine, and on a Windows Home Server. Installation was shockingly simple, given how complex Perforce administration can get. When installed locally, I had some slight lag issues where I would switch back to P4V and it would take a second or two to respond. Nothing major, and the PC wasn't all that great. When running on the Windows Home Server, I have none of those issues. It has been a while since I installed P4D, so I can't remember how much of the terminology you may need to know before installing for the first time. I used Perforce at work long before installing it at home, so what I consider a simple installation may be more confusing for someone who has never used Perforce.
The new P4VS plugin for Visual Studio is a huge step forward from the old SCC plugins they had. Still can be confusing if you don't understand how it's binding to the .suo file, and it has some issues when dealing with generated project files and solutions, but it's not a huge deal.
While there is a reason lots of game developers use Perforce, keep in mind a company's needs when it comes to source control are not the same as an individuals. Perforce can scale to thousands of users across a cluster of servers with proxy and replica servers and handle repositories hundreds of TBs in size and dealing with branches that are 100GB in size. You may be one person coding on your laptop in front of a TV. While Perforce supports that, you may find something else better suits your situation.
Im using it too at work. We dont have VS plugin installed though, just the Checkout and Revert commands added. P4 is really great but I wouldnt use it for my own projects ....its overkill:)
After switching to Mercurial, I cannot see why should I go back to P4. I was lured into trying it as it was rumored to be "easier". I found myself the hard way this was not the case.
I strongly suggest Mercurial+TortoiseHG.
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Thanks to your replies and different opinions, I am going to try some of them, the perforce, git and mercurial, but as I saw in git webpage, that is very well done and explained, with a simple tutorial and a free book, I think that at the end will choose it, but anyway I'm going to try them all and see which one feels better for one-person programming.
git is the latest trendy version control system, but tbh, for a single person project, you might want to try out Subversion.
Also, for administering it without dealing with the command line or services, I highly recommend SCM Manager (http://www.scm-manager.org). Whilst I only use it for SVN (because I am not trendy), it can support quite a few version control systems.
Also, for administering it without dealing with the command line or services, I highly recommend SCM Manager (http://www.scm-manager.org). Whilst I only use it for SVN (because I am not trendy), it can support quite a few version control systems.
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