Update hardware status week for the test team
We're starting to settle down from the shipping of OneNote 2010 with our new team. Of the many tasks facing us, we have a rather mundane task first - figure out the hardware each person has. We try to ensure each person has enough hardware to test OneNote and also has a machine or two for dogfood usage that represents a "real world' machine.
For instance, my primary (and now that I look at it, just about only) machine I regularly use for testing is an HP with a quad core processor, 16GB of RAM and 2 TB of drive space. This is hardly indicative of the machines most folks have. I use it to run HyperV images of different versions of Windows, and as I type this, it is running a Windows 2008 server image, a Windows 7 64 bit image, a Windows 7 32 bit image and a Windows XP image.
My "dogfood" or "real world" machine is my whipped-and-beaten-but-still-standing Lenovo. It only has 2GB of RAM and a new 160GB GB hard drive. It has Windows 7 currently on it, along with Office 2010 and not much else. For those of you that have been following this saga, the pen no longer stays in its clickable hole. I decided to try to get another few years of use out of it and we ordered a replacement hard drive when the old one went out. The more I use it, though, the more I love that keyboard. Oh, and this tablet is limited to 32 bit Windows.
I have one Microsoft issued desktop as well. It is a two year old Dell with 4GB of RAM and I don't know what type of processor it has. I've been using it as my desktop machine (part dogfood, part test) just to give me a little extra bit of flexibility.
Lastly, I have an OLD no-name Celeron based machine I used to get the object model code put on Codeplex. It was (is) literally the cheapest machine I could assemble at the time. I remember a 40GB hard drive was $42 at the time, and an 80GB drive was $2 more. I saved the $2 and went for the smaller, cheaper drive. IIRC, the motherboard was another $50 and the case was about $20. Anyway, it was cheap, it shows, and it is my OneNote 2007 machine I keep around for backwards compatibility testing now. It has developed a mysterious case of simply shutting down now and then so I don't know if it will last much longer. It won't get replaced if it dies.
So the team will be double checking and filling out a matrix of who has what type of hardware. This is especially important for folks transferring to OneNote from other teams - we want to get them all machines so that we can test ink and make sure we can all have roughly the equivalent machines for using HyperV. Makes training that much easier.
Questions, comments, concerns and criticisms always welcome,
John