This is something that have been annoying me a lot since i joined Microsoft. I installed Vista Ultimate on my laptop and used Virtual PC 2007 to run my MOSS environments. There's nothing bad about it, don't get me wrong. But i'm used to check little things; where to find files under the 12hive for example, check something from the object model by launching visual studio and so on. Ok, ok, all of these might have been reached by copying the 12hive to the vista machine and so fort - No thanks. And the VPC thingie is not the fastest way of doing these things. It takes a while to boot the image.

So. Now that longhorn reached its latest build I made the desicion. I'll go back to the model where i have a local MOSS and laptop running on a proper server OS. One step closer to practise what you preach :)

Few basic things to do:

1. Install Windows Server 2008 (i used the x64 version)
2. Add the IIS Role to the server and check all the necessary features (frameworks, inet mgr etc.)
   
3. To make it look like Vista you'll need to add the Desktop experience feature and then after the installation you need to do start -> run -> services.msc -> Enable "Themes"-service and start it. And then go to Control Panel -> Personalization -> Themes and switch it on.
4. Install SQL Server 2005 + SP2
5. Install MOSS
   And please, while installing - the only port you'll need is for central admin. For other sites use port 80 and host headers.
   Something that I did, was to install it with my domain credentials. I know, it will be a pain in the dark hole when it's time to change password, but hey, we did the same thing back at sps 2003 times ;)

After a clean boot my machine is consuming about 1.3Gb of RAM. Not bad at all. I didn't enable hyper-v because then you'll loose sleep mode and that's not nice when using a laptop platform.

Maybe i'll get back with you after some time and see how things have been going on with this setup.

Do it!