As my time at Viterra/ABB Grain is rapidly drawing to a close (more about that later), I've started to think about what would be useful (if not essential) for the next stage in my career (more about that later too!).

I think a laptop might be a useful tool. For the last couple of CodeCampSA events, I've borrowed my Mum's Toshiba. It's quite a nice machine, but I don't think she'd be too keen on lending it to me all the time! I don't know much about various models, but if I could manage to fit an SSD into the budget then I hear that can make a big difference.

For a while now I've also wanted to get up to speed with Hyper-V. The only thing preventing me has been access to suitable hardware. When Ben (the Virtual PC Guy) published the specs of the server he runs at home my eyes lit up, as it seems pretty similar to what I would like to achieve. Specifically

  • Hosting Windows Home Server
  • Running up VMs to run various server environments – particular different versions of SQL Server.

Finally if there was any room left in the budget, I'd really like to upgrade my main desktop machine too – it must be a joy to develop on machine like Scott Hanselman's.

Still, while my existing desktop is is an aging old box, it does the job and manages to run Windows 7 pretty well. One advantage of getting the Hyper-V server up and running would be that I could just RDP from my old box to a VM instead.