Really? Same Major version numbers. Same product family name (SQL/Hyper-V 2008). If your databases and virtual machines don't use any new features you might expect that they could be moved between servers. Or at least have the option to save a backup in a "compatible" format.
I think it's mostly my thing getting stuck on the naming of it, for me just slapping an "R2" on the 2008 line of server products (Windows, Hyper-V, SQL) instead of being consistent with their other year-based product names makes it seem like they are minor updates instead of different products.
I'd use Bitlocker for your Windows 7 laptop, as a previous commenter noted it has a mode to work via a USB key inserted at boot time. In my experience it's been fast and unobtrusive. I've never used TrueCrypt, though I've looked into it several times and remembered thinking that it looked just as good (or better) technically as Bitlocker, but the UI is really horrid and overly complicated if you're looking for something that's a "no-brainer": http://www.truecrypt.org/screenshots
2. You'll need the USB key inserted to power on the laptop or resume from hibernate, but not for waking it from sleep. That helps with convenience since you won't have to use the key to unlock it from sleep.
3. Make sure to back up the Bitlocker Recovery Key saved to the USB drive. It's saved as a hidden file, just put it somewhere safe online in case you lose the USB key.
4. Don't lose the USB key along with your laptop! Since that sort of defeats the point of encrypting the drive in the first place...
While Google/Bing/etc are great for searching public sites (when you can tolerate the latency between when content is posted and when google indexes it), they doesn't work at all for sites which are private/intranetted/password-protected or otherwise inaccessible to web crawlers.
The Compass GAE walkthrough (http://www.kimchy.org/searchable-google-appengine-with-compa...) was also able to get a rudimentary Lucene indexer up and running. However many people eventually ran into problems with App Engine's 30-second request processing limit. For your Solr instance did you utilize the Task Queue or have to do anything special to work around the 30-second limitation?
Thanks for the kind words @rauljara. I do indeed love Zipcar and as I mentioned I gave up my personal auto for the service. I'd say the percentage of "bad experiences" for my usage is probably less than 10%, but it is significant enough that you should know that if you become a serious Zipcar user you will run into bad experiences more often than you might think (and they never come at a good time...)
I think it's mostly my thing getting stuck on the naming of it, for me just slapping an "R2" on the 2008 line of server products (Windows, Hyper-V, SQL) instead of being consistent with their other year-based product names makes it seem like they are minor updates instead of different products.