I guess as a consultant, I'm used to working exclusively on my laptop and trying to use it to do everything. For a while I've used VHD's to provide various O/S and development environments which is wonderfull - except I always find them really slow. Now, I know that my laptop might not be top of the range or be jam packed with RAM but my solution of dual booting has always provided good performance, its just not as flexible as VHD's.

Enter Windows 7.

Recenlty I upgraded to Windows 7 and started re-installing my development tools. My biggest problem area was with Sharepoint. Previously I have managed to install this on Vista but always with limitations. Instead, I noticed the information about the ability to boot from VHD, starting with Windows 7 and Windows 2008 r2. For me, this is fantastic, I simple created a new VHD from Windows 7 (making it bootable) and installed 2008 r2 onto this.

Now I can simply boot from my 2008r2 VHD to do my development work and get much better performance while still providing the benefits of using VHD's.

Wonderful.