Virtualization for Developers
As I am a servant minister (volunteer), I do most of my work from home. However, installing Visual Studio, IIS, and especially SQL Server, was very taxing on my system, and it would often become bogged down by my development tools, even when I wasn't using them. Furthermore, my personal applications were bogging down my development tools. When I upgraded my computer recently, I decided to put my new hardware to good use: Running Virtual PC.
Virtual PC is available for free from Microsoft, and, in my opinion, is an invaluable tool for developers, even those with designated "work" computers. There is only one disadvantage: Virtual Machines take "real" memory. For example: if you give a VM 1GB of RAM, you will not be able to use that RAM while the VM is running, even if the VM isn't using it.
Here is Visual Studio running in my isolated Development environment:
If I hose my environment (which happens to everyone from time to time), I can simply cancel the changes I made during that session.
Another advantage to using Virtual PC is that you can try out betas without worrying about what you'll do to your system. Microsoft will often release a Virtual Hard Drive image for testing out new software, which can be downloaded for free. Here is the Internet Explorer 8 beta:
I hope this inspired you to download Virtual PC and give it a try!