Quick one today, as I need to spend time writing up my presentation from the Sitecore Technical User Group in Manchester last week. (Hopefully will have something done for next week's post)
As I've mentioned previously, I'm finding that getting new instances of Sitecore installed on a development machine is a bit of a "horses for courses" thing. Quick instances needed to test something or do some development that's not sensitive to precise configuration can be created quickly and easily with SIM. But sometimes I need to do some work that relies on me setting up the instance in as close as possible a way to how the production instance should be. That usually involves running the Sitecore installer.