How should I use Mercurial as a lone developer?

I have used CVS, Perforce, Subversion before as my personal version control system and went to Mercurial since about two weeks ago :-) At work we use MS Team System ...

For me the most notable new thing is easy transfer between different machines. At work I have stuff in a mercurial repo (using hg as a Super-Client against Team System). I regularily push/pull all changes to/from my Laptop so I have a full history at both machines.

At home I also push/pull the repo from the Laptop.

As a result I can work wherever I am (home office using a beefy computer, on the road using the laptop or at work) and not worry whether I will lose changes. Ok, occasionally I need to merge two changes but that rarely hurts ... hg does it quite nicely IMHO.

Additionally, the "setup cost" with mercurial is quite low. You read a tutorial, install it, say "hg init" and go on working. No more decding if something belongs into your sacred SVN server, where to put it and so on. Mercurial's "friction" is a little lower than SVN's.

I always use Git or Mercurial, even alone.

I separate the repositories when I want to make some reusable components available to other projects. I configured out to when I commit, it push automatically too (I did with Tortoise HG plugin), because sometimes I forgot to push, and when move geographically I need that code, understand?

So, this is my tips.