Bloat

I just wanted to say this. I have a test machine at work. It runs Slackware 12.2. I wiped the Windows XP corporate image off because my attempts to turn it into a lab environment with Sun's VirtualBox were running into resource hurdles.

With Slackware, I can run four "servers" concurrently with no issues. Now, granted, they serve only for me to test loading specific software/patches/etc. on them, but still. Four server OS's run just fine.

But, this week I was tasked with testing a deployment of a small AV package to a Vista workstation. Not having access to a real one on our corporate network, I of course decided to load one up in the VM.

Wow. Talk about hogging the trough. Vista took literally hours to finalize it's install. That didn't include the 143MB of updates (not too bad, updating our corporate image of XP was hell). But still, it was a pain. Then, I see that the usual 8GB partition I used to install these things (which was fine for Windows 2003, Windows 2003 and MS SQL 2005, as well as various other test servers), was full. Well, not quite full. There was 50MB left.

Now I get to try to expand the drive and/or reinstall on a bigger virtual drive.

The joy!