This weekend I have mostly been setting up my testing environments. As I have noted before, I was fortunate enough to grab a cheap copy of Windows 2000 on Ebay. I also have a copy of Server 2003 that I got through the MSDN AA, and spent the weekend setting them up on a 45 day trial of Virtual PC 2004. Just waiting on a copy of ME in the post (the sacrifices made to ensure quality [grin]).



Boy, does this software rock. 2000 runs without a flaw, though 2003 does suffer the odd hiccup (my hardware is kinda modest these days). Setting up a new OS is as simple as though it were running on hardware. The only issue I have with it is that it doesn't seem to read past the first session on a burned DVD. Hopefully this has been sorted out by the service pack released for it, or at least in the next version.

I'll be playing with this for the duration of the demo, and am seriously thinking about picking up a copy. I'll also be running all builds through these, and having a couple of systems that I can abuse without fear of any serious failure is going to be a great boon for testing.


Unfortunatly this does mean that I didn't get the unit testing that I had hoped to done, thats scheduled for tomorrow night.