Server 2008 as a Workstation: Preface

Last week, I wrote of my goal of creating a Server 2008-based laptop that I could use either as a normal business laptop, or as a server platform for testing out Hyper-V. Several questions loomed:

1. Would Server 2008 x64 support most of my (Dell Latitude D830) laptop hardware? and would Dell's 64-bit Vista drivers work fine with Server 2008?

2. Could the machine be made responsive enough to act as a viable workstation, even though the OS was designed for a server?

3. Could the machine act as a reasonable facsimile of a Vista box, for teaching and demo purposes?

4. Would the system run my various day-to-day applications with acceptable speed and reliability?

In this and the next few sections of the blog, I'll go through some of the hoops that required jumping through, and come up with some answers to the above questions - answers that may be useful for those of you who are interested in walking down the same path with your laptop (or desktop). So far, I can report that this experiment has been a big success. Read on for details.

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