A month ago I finished a big project, and rewarded myself with a new SSD for my aging laptop.  It's a little extravagant, but I get to humor myself that way.  Imagine the over-kill of a 6gb transfer speed idled down to a 1.5gb controller.  Fear not, this drive will me moving to the next laptop too!  

So what now.  Of course one thing I am looking for is running Windows XP in VirtualBox, with a couple of images - one for IE8 and one with IE9.  You just need these to do real testing, the alternatives just aren't it.  

I started with a 125gb drive, which is actually 116gb of workable space after it created a clone partition on install.  (not my fault, I really should reclaim that space - but that's another story)  So two virtual machine installs each are taking about 25gb and 14gb each.  I tried to squeeze them down a bit, but could not get them to shrink down.  

That means stupid windows testing environments are 39 gb.  While the whole Ubuntu operating system is 6gb.  

The SSD really loved Ubuntu, the whole thing loads up in about 12 seconds!  

Even though the boot disk is only 128gb, I actually gained that much space because I replaced the cd caddy with a sata drive caddy.  I'm not carrying two drives, the 128gb ssd, and the original 500gb hdd.  

Who says you can't take it with you?