Today I received my additional 4GB RAM and an eSATA hard drive caddy.  The Dell Latitude 6500 takes 2 memory boards.  The original in mine had 4GB RAM.  I added an additional 4GB board this morning.  I’m running Windows 7 x64 on my smaller hard disk so I’ll be able to use all that memory when booted up in the desktop OS.

There’s an eSATA socket which gives me great performance for external storage.  I had installed Windows Server 2008 R2 on the Dell supplied 250GB SATA disk.  I don’t want to be “opening” up the laptop and using a screwdriver every time I want to change OS.  Plus I didn’t want to do native VHD because it would eat up disk space on a single laptop disk.

I put the Server disk into the caddy.  Plugging in it’s two cables into the laptop (USB power and eSATA) gives me that disk.  When I hit F12 to see my boot options the disk caddy appears – as the next boot device after the internal disk.  I can select it and go into my Hyper-V demo environment.  How sweet is that?  The caddy was around €25 including courier delivery, is not much bigger than a 2.5” SATA drive and comes with a little wallet to protect it.  This is a seriously cool and flexible demo lab now.