SuperJason’s Personal Blog

Over the past year or so, I’ve been trying to minimize the number of applications that I actually have to install. I’ve been doing this in a number of ways:

• Using portable applications whenever possible. These are applications that have been written or recompiled to store their settings in the folder that they are run from, and not the registry. This allows you to simply copy the folder to a new machine and the application will run.
• Using SVS for applications that are infrequently used. This lets me activate and deactivate them, and they leave no trace on my system. If any SVS application is running, however, it can have a performance impact on your system. That is why I don’t use it for commonly used applications.
• Using VMware to separate different functional areas. For example, I have a virtual machine that is running a full copy of our enterprise application.

About a month ago, I reinstalled Windows on my main work machine. I’ve implemented the above concepts as much as possible. I actually went so far as to start using VMware as my development environment (which I had talked about before). I don’t have Visual Studio 2005 even installed on my computer now. In addition, all of my development tools such as ReSharper, TestDriven.NET, and TortoiseSVN are installed in the virtual machine.

I thought it would be difficult to switch, but it’s been a pleasure. The virtual machine requires very little maintenance, and either does my host operating system. The separation makes it very clear where things get installed.

Performance has also been excellent. The virtual machine is very snappy, and I don’t notice any drop in performance. The real benefit is on my host computer. Since there is not much running, it boots like a fresh install, and everything responds like it did when I first set it up.

I also now have the option of moving the virtual machine when needed. For example, I’m getting a new laptop, and I’ll simply be able to copy the virtual machine over, and be up and running within minutes instead of hours. I’m also able to run the virtual machine on a high powered server if available. This works particularly well at home where I have a great VMware server machine. I can use remote desktop to remotely access the machine with any host. You can start to imagine where the cost savings start to come into play.

Today I looked at my system information, and I realized that I haven’t rebooted since I installed Windows, and got everything set up! I have rebooted the virtual machine, but I’ve never been at a point where I couldn’t be using my computer. Life is good.