I noted recently that I purchased a new desktop with the intention of moving to Windows 2008 and Hyper-V. That arrived, and I've been working on setting it up.
It's been great and got me wondering if I could do the same thing on my laptop? After all, I bought a 2GB RAM upgrade for it last year, taking it from 2GB to 4GB, but my 32-bit Vista Ultimate install doesn't see it. At the time I was assuming that the desktop OSes (XP, Vista) would function like the server ones and use up to 4GB. After all, that's what's addressable by 32-bit processors.
However, in their limited wisdom, Microsoft didn't do something right and so my XP desktop saw only 2GB and the Vista one got to 3GB.
So I did some searching, and while there are lots of utilities, like the CPU-Z one from CPUID.com, it doesn't just say "32bit" or "64-bit" on it. I finally found specs at Intel for my Core 2 Duo T7500 CPU, which said it supported the Intel VT technology. Then I found the blog at Accentient that mentioned he had the same CPU in a DELL laptop and put W2K8 on it.
Apparently there are quite a few people trying W2K8 on their desktop, and even a blog at http://www.win2008workstation.com/wordpress/ dedicated to helping you do this.
There's discussion of application compatibility, which is key. I use ULead VideoStudio, but it's listed as no issues on this page.
So as I get through converting my desktop over completely I'll be looking to convert the laptop as well. Hopefully I'll have this working by PASS and everyone can see how it works.
A great Hyper-V blog here at Accentient Blog.
I was searching around for information on setting up Hyper-V and I ran across this blog, which has some great instructions for getting started. Including a 3 part series on Using 64-bit Windows Server 2008 as a Workstation OS, which is exactly what I want to do. The parts are:
I recently purchased a new machine with the intention of going this route. My old machine was an AMD 64-bit one, but it couldn't take more than 4GB, and I was fed up with slowness in VMs.
So far I've used some of the hints in this blog to get started, installing W2K8 and Hyper-V.
