TechEd 2004 - Tempting the demo gods!
TechEd has started!
This means that I’ll be nervous until my presentation on Thursday! I’m not nervous about showing off individual features because they are great and I’ve been working on them or with them for a while now, I’m more nervous about being able to do justice to all the features in the time that I have during the presentation.
I’m also tempting the demo gods by using a different hardware/software configuration than normal. Let me explain.
I use Virtual PC (VPC) all the time at work to play with daily builds of Visual Studio and I’ve always wanted to use them for demos but I didn’t feel comfortable with the performance of a VPC running on my laptop (the performance was nearly acceptable but when you are presenting you want every piece of performance you can get!).
This presented a problem for me (and for most PMs). I didn’t want to rebuild my main laptop for the conference and I didn’t have a spare “demo” laptop laying around to install the build.
Just before the conference I stumbled across this article and last week bought an external USB drive to run the VPC image off. The USB drive is a 200Gb drive, 7200 RPM, 8Mb buffer and the VPC performance was much better.
The only problem now is that I need to carry another piece of hardware (which needs its own power cord) but it’s well worth the extra hassle and weight.
As soon as I get back to Redmond I’ll be looking for a smaller form factor for the drive and start to spread the word.
Anyone got any suggestions about drives that work for them?
