I'm rebuilding my laptop and since I have a month before I need to deliver another training course I thought I would give some BETA software the opportunity to run against the host hardware - no I am not going to be running Longhorn for the next month (although I would love to), instead I will be running Windows XP with Whidbey B1. For the most part I have been running Whidbey under Virtual PC, but I find that if I bring it out in to my everyday environment I get much more familiar with it.

Longhorn won't be staying on here, I just decided to see how well it runs while I was waiting for the ISO image of the Windows XP SP2 slipstream editon to download from Subscriber Downloads. It is actually a thing of beauty when it runs on real steel - the UI performance is rock solid and disk I/O performance seems indistinguishable from Windows XP (although I am certain it is slower given the preview nature of these bits). I did have the WinHEC build running in a VM but I installed that off an DVD ISO image and I don't have a DVD burner handy to do it onto the real hardware. I've had mixed experiences running Longhorn to date - the UI paints were pretty slow and the disk I/O was very poor which seems to be a common theme in VM installations.