People always ask me what OS do I use. And I have to admit I just switched to Vista. And with that change I put a serious issue in front of my. I can no longer develop in older applications (visual studio 2003). So to get around this I use VPC (virutal PC’s) I have used these in the past to run different operating systems (windows server, or an older version of sql)
I have found over the years that the performance of VPC 2004 was not that great. But with the new version Virtual PC 2007 I have seen some serious performance gains. http://www.microsoft.com/windows/virtualpc/default.mspx (to download)
For those who don’t know, VPC’s basically let you run another opperating system on your machine, in a window. It is great for development and testing, because you don’t have to purchase any more hardware.