Before you do anything else I'd recommend P2V'ing the physical box into a virtual machine - so if it fails you can still work on the code. Personally I use VM's for all my development environments now - going back to Visual Studio 6 - so if I ever have to revisit some old bit of code I just spin up the old VM and the project is usually still in the MRU list. Many of the old VM's are XP but you can generally just stop them having internet access so they are pretty safe especially if only spun up on demand.

As much memory and as many cores as you can afford, fast disk for main OS (SSD) large mirrored (4TB x 2) disks for the data - then VMWare Workstation for all the dev work. I have VM's for each Visual Studio back to v6 - turn them off when not needed but if you ever need to work on some old code no need to do a risky project upgrades. The VM's can then in future just carry over to your next machine - so if the mother ship starts looking outdated or just dies you don't have to reinstall loads of stuff to get back working. And I keep my "latest" dev VM on a Samsung USB3 SSD so I can run it off my laptop as well if I need to work on a client site. I have actually worked like this for over a decade and have upgraded the mother ship only 2 times since then - last in 2012 just beginning to think of an upgrade now - i7 3770k + 32GB ram seemed expensive in 2012 - but it is still a good workhorse 6 years later so worth it if you are looking long term

I was a member until it ran out :( ... but I do work through a limited company.

Have you tried turning off the power saving stuff for the monitors?

Whatever method you use I also like to have a set of "red herring" credentials - that looks likes a password, - e.g. config setting Password with some cyrptic looking string that could be an encrypted string - sends the b'rs of on a wild goose chase

SQL Server Developer Edition is available on it's own for about £50

Select Count(*) has to do the fuzzy like search on the whole table just to show rows that match might exist - so it will probably do a full table scan (if start of like is a %) better is to let SQL return as soon as it has found one row that matches - so use exists - e.g.

String.Format("SELECT 1 WHERE EXISTS (SELECT 1 FROM data WHERE oznacenie LIKE '{0}')", data)

That way SQL can stop looking after the first row it finds that matches. Depending on size of table this can make a huge difference in performance. This will return 0 or 1 records to the rowcount which you can get using ExecuteScalar return

21 char string literal into 20 char varchar = 'SkipSuppressedMember' losing the s

I tend to agree - the more iffy the code I am writing the more comments it has - in general I like the code to explain for itself and I always look at what other peoples code is doing despite any comments they have left because the code doesn't lie - comments are often outdated or just an indication of what the programmer hoped was happening. When I know my code is not doing something obvious I comment it - but I much prefer it to be obvious

But if it is null rather than the result you expected and you want to dig in a bit to find where it is going wrong it is a nightmare so you end up expanding it out a bit to trace then perhaps collapsing again once it is working (or more likely leaving well alone). While I like the concept of the single line solution until you can step through the parts I can see why you would validly avoid it.

Probably because it is a bitch to debug

Ha - you beat me

SELECT Region, Contact FROM RegionTable ORDER BY SubString(Region,2,1) DESC, Contact ASC

Your best bet is a "clean build" PC to test on - I use VMWare Workstation for this - it allows you to rollback the state of the Virtual Machine so you can go back to "clean" for testing the installers. As for the mystery of it still working on your PC - it depends a bit on the way the DLL is called from VB - if you are using CreateObject as in e.g. wordObj = CreateObject("Word.Application") then the registry is searched first for Word.Application class then it picks up a GUID in that to get actual reg info point to the OLE DLL. This is known as "Late Binding". Early binding is what you get when you add the DLL to the references in your VB project. Can't remember for sure but there is a good chance that when you open the VB project if it is early bound and it doesn't find the registry info that it automatically re-registers the DLL - and it is likely it does this even if you don't run the project (because it needs the reference to be working to even allow a compile). I recommend ProcMon (old Sysinternals tool - now Microsoft) to spy on what is going on and ow the registry info for your DLL is being found.

Your code also checks things it needn't - once the first bool is false we know the displays are not the same so we can short circuit and return - why do the extra compares unless you just want to burn a bit of CPU

That is why I develop in Virtual Machines now - my Visual Studio 6 one now rarely gets powered up, like wise VS2003, VS2005 and VS2008 still very active depending on client. This way I know that if I ever have to go back to do some fix on real old code - even if I have changed machines many times since then I can fire up a Virtual Machine and go into the project and update without faffing around.

Punched cards

I think it is down to economics of production of LCD panels - 1080 vert is 1080p for TV's - using it for monitors means they can produce the same panels for TVs and monitors and enjoy the economies of scale - I agree it isn't great for a monitor but hell they are cheap now aren't they.

ESXi has pretty restricted hardware support for the host machine. Also I have found the VMWare tools targeting server operating systems are not that great for "interactive" VM's like you would want for development - they are good for "headless" things like SQL server etc but the console support is often not as good as those targetting the "workstation" environment. Obviously VMWare Workstation is the product VMWare have targetting this environment - but that is not free - though may well be worth the $200ish if what it gives you over player is considered a requirement. In particular it obviously helps making VM's as it is all wizard GUI based. It also has some great "SsnapShot" handling tools for rolling VM's back to previous points - but I don't like those for my Dev VM's - great for testing though

"He really likes external USB drives for the portability" So did I - but found USB a bit slow - so my portable disk docks in main machine as SATA. When undocked on notebook it can connect by USB or eSATA so I added a eSATA Express Card to the notebook for faster access when mobile - on trains etc that is a bit cumbersome (needs a thicker eSATA cable, eSATA card sticks out a bit and disk power has to come from USB anyway) so I just use USB.