04 Oct Windows and office upgrades – off topic

<Earl Grey>

This is off-topic for my normal postings, but I just wanted to congratulate MS on the ease, over the last year or so that I’ve migrated my laptop to from Vista etc…

I’ve currently got a Dell Latitude D830, which is 2.5 years old.  I originally bought it because I needed something with a bit of beef to run the PS2007 image.

It came with Windows Vista 64 bit, and when the Windows 7 release candidate was available, I upgraded to this, and when Windows 7 RTM’d, I upgraded to that.  Note that this wasn’t a wipe and install, it was an upgrade each time.

I’ve just upgraded from Office 2007 to office 2010, and that went fine.  I’m still running Project 2003, 2007 and 2010 on the lappy too.

The original spec was a 160GB hard drive, I added a 500GB SATA drive into the CD/DVD bay for better performance when running VMs, (total capacity now 660GB), and 8GB RAM (not officially supported by DELL, but it works fine).  The 160GB drive became a little limiting, so I just bought another 500GB drive, and using the built in tools in backup/restore created a system image of the 160GB drive, and restored it to the new 500GB drive (total drive space now 1TB).  I suspect I’ll get another 2 years life out of this laptop now.

All of the upgrades have been achieved with none of the usual hassle that is associated with upgrading PCs and laptops.

For those of you who went down the route of buying an SSD and installing Windows Server on your laptop to run PS2010, I didn’t bother with any of that, instead installed PS2010 on a run of the mill 2U rack server, and enabled remote access to that via the ‘net.  I run all my training and demo’s on that system, and I’ve only met one customer who couldn’t give me access to it via their network.  This was easily solved by using a mobile WIFI dongle, and using MSTSC to connect to the server – it all works fine. 

Anyway, I’ll be posting on PS2010 soon, so life will be back to normal soon.

Regards,  Ben.