I've spent the past day and a half at work building up some barebones base-build VMs (Virtual PC virtual machines). That's a _long_ time to spend watching progress bars, but it's the sort of task that you can only really do when you have some downtime. And I have an ulterior motive - I need to get a working version of the VWD beta installed and running so I can test out the latest offerings from Microsoft, and so I can get on with writing my next chapter for the Beginning ASP.NET v2 rewrite.
It's strange how much I've come to depend on Virtual PC on a day to day basis. I currently have 7 VMs on my hard drive, and a further 12 on my external hard drive, and each of them has their uses. Whether it be a full-scale development VM for one of the projects at work, a virtual machine with an un-hacked version of Microsoft Office on it for demonstrating the out-of-the-box functionality of Office to customers, or an empty VM ready to be copied and built upon for a new project, I think I might actually have too many VMs now...
Many of the guys at work have VMs on a central server and run via Virtual Server, which is a pretty cool way to use VMs if you're short on memory or drive space, but the inability to drag and drop files from the VM to your local machine in that scenario is _really_ infuriating! The wierdest thing this morning was seeing one of the developers in the office partitioning a hard drive - and on a 60Gb NTFS drive, I think this is probably unnecessary. The only times I really found partitions useful was when I had dual book operating systems, but since I have VPC now, I don't need that any more. I've not looked into the current line of thinking about disk size and partitioning to improve performance, but I'm sure a 60Gb drive shouldn't need to be partitioned. Still, it's not my laptop :)