Do you have enough resources on your laptop to install VirtualPC?  I know a few people do this.

Can I ask you why you want to do this? I'm running XP at home - and just yesterday - I uploaded my master portal to my 2003 server and replicated 10 ecommerce sites on there.

I think you'd be better off setting up another dev/staging instance on your webserver rather than try to emulate the online version unless you can get a mirrored copy of the webserver infrastructure since even if you have a build on your local drive, unless you have the 'exact' version locally, you're still going to have different results.

When I work locally - I'm working with virtual directories, but when working live, I'm working with web based IIS and not virtual directories, and the permissions are different, and I still didn't have any problems creating my master build, then ftp to server, log in and create the 10 new ecommerce sites. (mind you I've been working on this for quite some time so it didn't happen just like that).

This is just piece of advice based on how I do things, and if it saves you a bit of time or eliminates some doubts you might have had, that would be a good start to 2007.

So, use either VirtualPC where you can disconnect it and use resources only when needed, setup a staging environment on server, or just do as I do, test it locally, learn how your live environment works, and then you can work confidently knowing it can be ported to your liven environment.

Nina Meiers