Hey chimps.

So, more and more, I'm doing web application stuff, or finding I need to test over HTTP.

So, for awhile, I've been running XP with IIS 5.1 and SQL2005 Express all locally on my work laptop, which is ok, but limited, and tends to get wonky with certain extensions and drivers. I also have a 5400 rpm drive and 2GB of RAM, so it slows things down.

The Work Laptop:
  • XP Pro
  • IIS 5.1
  • SQL 2005
  • ColdFusion
  • PHP (needed, not installed yet)
  • MySQL (needed, not installed yet)
  • Ruby (wanted, not installed yet)


As you can see, that's a lot of crap that I don't even use every day, but it helps to have your entire environment on a machine you can pick up and take with you.

Now, at home, I'm starting to do some more web work on the side, but I also use my home machine for everyday stuff, some games, web surfing, banking, photos, working from home, etc. It's almost the same setup, but again, 2GB of RAM, and I rarely use all those things on a regular basis at home. I'd like to be able to just flip them all on with one button when I need.

So, what should I do? Work on Win2K3/8 on the work laptop? Virtualize? Get a separate box at home for a dev server? Dual boot?

I want clean, uncluttered, clear environments, because I pop in and out of projects over the course of several months, and things get confusing. I also don't have time to dick around with learning the intricacies of admining Apache, or digging around online for DLL's to get PHP to work with SQL. (However, PHP and MySQL are requirements for SOME projects, not all.)

Advice?