What kind of hardware do you need to do SharePoint environment?

Microsoft recommends a minimum of 32Gb for SharePoint Server, less for SharePoint Foundation.

But there are not many laptops in the wild with 32Gb; certainly none that I'd like to have in my lap. (My Dell 4600 does have 32Gb, but I'm a wee fellow at 1.87m, and rather too many kilos.)

This is written on a Samsung 900somethingsomething, a beautiful ultrabook with 8Gb of ram and a 256 SSD.

Probably the nicest thing about this machine is what Apple-users have taken for granted for years now; instant on.

I open the lid, and I can start typing almost immediately (I've disabled "require password when resuming).

So, given that this is the PC I like to use when I'm pretending to watch "When Harry met Sally" or "Eurovision Song Contest," wouldn't it be nice if this machine can run SharePoint?

Purchase Win8Pro, enable hyper-v, and...

Joy!

I chose to install SP with the minimum of services. No search, workflow, excel services or similar for me. If I want to play with those things, I'll do it at work.

I gave the vm 5550Mb, which win8 claimed was the maximum.

With VS2012 and IE with a couple of sites open, I'm still juuust south of 4Gb.

Which isn't bad.

I've also configured my Samsung for silent running (i.e. max battery lifetime, and slow down the cpu so that the fan doesn't need to spin). So it isn't fast. But the things I want to play with, team sites, apps, ecm, do work.