The Beast!

I got my new laptop in today. It is a rebadged Clevo 901 sporting a Quad Xeon 2.83 GHz proc, RAID5 with 3 200 gig spindles at 7200 RPM and 4 gig of RAM. I can upgrade to 8 gig of RAM when the memory becomes cheap enough. It also has a nVidia 8800M video card.

The sucker is huge with a 17 inch wide screen display (1680x1050) and is almost three inches thick. It's definately not a laptop but a desktop replacement. In my case, it is a mobile server.

I was able to order it without an OS as I can get a license through my employer. Today I loaded up Win2k8 64-bit Standard (no need for Enterprise as I am not clustering my "laptop." I also loaded SQL Server 2005 64-bit and then VS2008 Team Suite Testing Edition. On top of that I threw in Office 2007 and spent a lot of the day twiddling with installations and settings.

After using the Win2k8 interface for a while it seems that I am going to just have to bite the bullet and get used to the Vista UI as Win2k8 uses it as well. *sigh* It was good knowing ya, XP Pro.

But, for what it's worth, Win2k8 did seem pretty damn snappy. Of course, it might have something to do with the quad core Xeon and 4 gig of RAM and a 512 meg video card. :)

I also enabled IIS and Hyper-V after I enabled VMM and NX in the machine's BIOS configuration. I'm stoked about Hyper-V but I've already found out one bummer with Hyper-V and that is enabling the Hyper-V role disables the ability to hibernate the machine. I guess I can understand why. If you are hosting a bunch of VMs with Hyper-V you really don't need the ability to hibernate the server. So, it's a minor irritation that but is all.

I did enable some eye-candy such as smoothing fonts and thumbnails instead of icons. That is one Vista thing that I really liked. That and the use of c:\users instead of the iritating "documents and settings." If you are a keyboard commando like me, those spaces get to be damned annoying. Of course, Microsoft still uses spaces in a lot of their subdirs so the issue isn't totally settled.

And I learned something from my previous Vista Ultimate experience on my older laptop (15.4 inch more conventional laptop, not a UberPowah machine like my current big rig) and that is to avoid the Microsoft Unix tools and just run with the GNU Unix Tools for Win32. I found a lot of unix commands lacking with the MS implementation and it is easier to unzip the GNU tools and add the subdir to the path. Of course, I can't compile any X code like I supposedly could with the MS unix services but I didn't need to compile any anyway so it is no great loss.

Another side effect is that I had to buy a new laptop bag and this time instead of a backpack I went with a Swiss Army gear rolling laptop bag that let's me put both my new MobileServer and Acer Ferrari in the bag at the same time and roll it along. With both machines and accessories (power bricks, extra battery, typical junque) that bag feels like it weighs in at 45 - 50 pounds. That would have been a bit tough to carry around an airport. I spent more than I wanted to but I think it'll be worth it.

On other good news fronts last week work gave me two physical boxen to actually build up my LT environment and I think that I'll actually be doing some dry runs tomorrow measuring up initial testing capacity with JMeter testing against FTP chunking my GPG encrypted files for the service to munch on. Finally!

I've been doing a lot of hopping around at work but my goal is still the same, to get daily automagic load tests running and in place with our continuous integration work flow.