Tell me about it. In my home envionment I'm on 3Ghz with 1Gb of memory, I should really double my memory. I make sure that my development environment purely has development + administrative + Office apps. If I want to use anything that is outside the development scope I boot to another partition.

I have seperate partitions for multimedia, music sequencing, games and development. Everything is RAID mirrored to another hard disk, and I periodically backup everything via ghost to an external USB hard disk.

It took me an age to setup properly I can tell you, but this really has helped me out of some fine scrapes in the past (already had two hard disk failures in its first year of operation).

Cheers

Alex

About six months ago, after having an agonizingly slow development environment, I switched to VirtualPC's and have not looked back since. I use a 768 Mb VPC for DNN and can happily run VS2003, VS2005, IIS (don't care for Cassini) and SQL Studio concurrently. The key to performance I discovered after much experimentation was a combination of two things --

1) Defragmented disk  -- I have the disk defragmenting in both host and guest PCs automatically whenever the computer has been idle for more than an hour, and

2) Leaner Registry -- by not installing Office and other registry bloatware, everything is just so much faster. Other performance sappers included Acrobat (replaced with Foxit Reader), Norton Anti-Virus (replaced with NOD32) and Daemon Tools (replaced with MagicDisc).

Also, the host PC has no third-party apps which has the added bonus of near-instant bootup. After living in this Utopia, I can confidently say that I am never going back to a non-VPC environment. I will be happy to share additional details about how to setup and optimize VPCs for DNN development if anyone is interested.

Nik