Thinking about the trade-off between spending lots of time now on getting a hardware platform up and running and continue working through the books, leaving the hands-on exercises until later, I am leaning heavily towards the latter option.

I will start building the environment on Wednesday afternoon, a time when studying quietly is not an option anyway on account of the cleaning lady and the vacuumer.

The only thing that is really obvious is that I do not have two or more spare machines lying around that can reasonably be considered powerful enough to run Windows Server 2003.

Next consideration is the Linux machine, Denver. I have used it for VMWare before and at some time in the distant past, I have upgraded the RAM to something like 748MB. As I recall, Windows 2000 workstation ran decent enough, once the disk cache was filled. Not quite the same as what I have in mind now, but really, a working system is more important than high-spec performance.

The only problem will be that even a minimal setup will require something like 2GB hard drive space; probably more if I configure a large swap partition as well. The machine has two hard drives, but I don't think that there will be enough space on it. That would mean I would have to either archive as much as I can off that box and onto CDs or do the same with less accuracy and thrash it for a completely new install (long overdue anyway). Looks like a day or two work in any case, which is not ideal by far.

For various reasons I won't go into now, I have decided to take the MCSE exams. Initially, that just means gathering the knowledge one would need to pass those exams. I started out in the obvious place, by buying and working through the Windows Server 2003 Core Requirements Study Kit.

This project starts off with the necessary setup that I will have to do be able to do the exercises in the books. Other than that, it will give me ample opportunity to play around with throw-away Windos Server 2003 machines; an opportunity I normally do not get very often.