Like a bunch of folks I have moved over to running 64-bit Windows Server 2008 as the primary OS on my laptop, a Dell D830.

The only problems I've had so far are that when the hypervisor is active sound playback is very poor and graphics performance becomes very poor - resizing a window is very jerky and takes ages. VM performance is great but the host seems to suffer. If you use Virtual PC/Server you'll notice that their performance is awful when the hypervisor is active.

I recently found the solution in this blog post http://blogs.msdn.com/virtual_pc_guy/archive/2008/04/14/creating-a-no-hypervisor-boot-entry.aspx.

You need to create an alternate boot configuration woth the hypervisor loaded. It's a simple fix -

1. Start an administrative command prompt
2. bcdedit /copy {current} /d "Microsoft Windows Server 2008 - no hypervisor"
3. bcdedit /set {identifier for the new boot entry (copy from the output of a plain 'bcdedit' command)} hypervisorlaunchtype off

and next time you boot you can choose to have the hypervisor on or off.

In my May 25th post I forgot to add one of the most important tools you'll need - a good virtual machine environent.

There are three to choose from...

• Microsoft Virtual PC
• Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2
• VMware Workstation

Once you have built a DC/application server and a client or two you have the perfect safe environment to experiment in. If it all goes horribly wrong you can roll back the changes you have made and start again.

My preference is for Virtual PC 2007 or VMWare Workstation. They both run as simple applications. Virtual Server installs and is managed through a web site and is a whole lot more fiddly to use.

Both of the Microsoft products are free but VMWare is still the better product.