Over the weekend, it seems like a mini-meme went through http://blogs.msdn.com, "How many computers does it take to make a Microsoft employee happy".

Normally I don't do meme's but enough people have asked this question privately that...

What machines do I have in my office today?

I currently have four computers with power cords connected to them - my dev machine (a 3ish GHz HP machine), and two test machines (one AMD64, one Dell 2ish GHz machine), and my laptop (an old Dell Lattitude C610).  I also have an old Dell that's currently taking up space in the corner in case I need a spare kernel debugger machine (I used to use it for Windows Media Connect testing).

Over the years, I've had as many as 8 computers in my office, typically I've got three (the AMD64 is mostly a loaner, for some AMD64-only work I'm doing).

As I mentioned, my highest number of computers was 8.  That was back when I was in Exchange and had to have an NT4 machine running Exchange 5.5, two machines running Exchange 2000, one development machine, one laptop, a prototype Itanium machine (which was kept powered off most of the time) and one other I don't remember).

When I started, I had three computers - a PC/XT, a Salmon (prototype PC/AT), a PCjr (which was turned off most of the time), and a Z19 terminal.  How times have changed.

It's a little bit weird - I've not debugged on the same machine I develop on for almost my entire career at Microsoft.  It's to the point that even when I COULD develop on my dev machine (when I was working on SCP) I didn't - I copied all the bits to my test machine and ran the tests on the dedicated test machine.  After all this time, I'm not sure that I'd feel comfortable going back to working on the same machine as my source code.