During one of my internships I was charged with setting up one of the laptops[1] Bill Gates's demo'd on at CES. The demos were carefully crafted between the IS

During one of my internships I was charged with setting up one of the laptops[1] Bill Gates's demo'd on at CES. The demos were carefully crafted between the ISVs, Microsoft's marketing, and for the real bleeding edge stuff, Microsoft's own developers. What I remember most is how carefully the machines were setup. We'd come up with install scripts and manual installation steps that were designed to ensure maximum stability for what were often beta releases. The entire process was designed to be repeatable again and again with excellent documentation so if something popped up on the showroom floor getting back to a working state was as close to foolproof as possible. [1] Obv. I did other things, but there was a lot of work around prepping for trade show demos.