I'm doing a presentation about Class Server tomorrow. This is a neat product that we have been using in Hull for a while. To show it off to its best I of course need a Class Server installation. This means a Windows Server 2003 system with a fair few trimmings.

I've put it all on my notebook PC in a Virtual PC. This means I can carry it around with me and use it when required. It is a PC within a PC. If it breaks I just delete the file that it lives in and nothing is really lost. If I like it a lot I copy the file onto another machine and use it there. I think Virtual PC technology is wonderful. Some time back I wrote some stuff about Windows NT configuration. I had to have four PCs running and networked together so that I could show how they interact. Took up the entire living room and number one wife was most unimpressed. Today I could do just the same thing with a single notebook computer. All four "machines" would sit together on one physical device and just work together. I htink in the future I will use a minimally configured machine on which I run the VPC image of my choice. One for writing books, another for hard core developing, another for a server etc etc. Great Stuff.