Like a bunch of folks I have moved over to running 64-bit Windows Server 2008 as the primary OS on my laptop, a Dell D830.

The only problems I've had so far are that when the hypervisor is active sound playback is very poor and graphics performance becomes very poor - resizing a window is very jerky and takes ages. VM performance is great but the host seems to suffer. If you use Virtual PC/Server you'll notice that their performance is awful when the hypervisor is active.

I recently found the solution in this blog post http://blogs.msdn.com/virtual_pc_guy/archive/2008/04/14/creating-a-no-hypervisor-boot-entry.aspx.

You need to create an alternate boot configuration woth the hypervisor loaded. It's a simple fix -

1. Start an administrative command prompt
2. bcdedit /copy {current} /d "Microsoft Windows Server 2008 - no hypervisor"
3. bcdedit /set {identifier for the new boot entry (copy from the output of a plain 'bcdedit' command)} hypervisorlaunchtype off

and next time you boot you can choose to have the hypervisor on or off.

As an MCT I end up taking a bunch of Microsoft exams every year. One of the really frustrating things about the Prometric booknig system is that there is no easy way to find your nearest testing centre. This is especially annoying as I travel a lot and often want to fit an exam in at a nearby testing center.

This as now irritated me to the point of doing something about it and I've put all of the UK centers on a Google map so that I can always find the nearest one.

The map is here http://maps.google.co.uk/maps/ms?hl=en&ie=UTF8&msa=0&msid=104220127815935886384.00046502a6b697dac55b5&z=6

or

http://tinyurl.com/by444z

Hopefully other UK test takers will find this useful :-)