This has been a very bad week - since the Beta of SharePoint 2010 came out I have been trying to install it and set up a demo environment for developers on my laptop - without much success. Since 2010 requires 64 bit, this ruled out using VPC, and since I don't like using 2008 as the host on my laptop, this meant I had two choices: virtualize with a non-MS solution that allows 64bit clients (virtualbox by sun or vmware) or install sharepoint directly on my windows 7 host - which means I would have Beta software running on my production laptop.
I chose to try virtualbox - and failed twice. First I installed windows 2008r2, and during my presentation to the user group last week it was a disaster - the site kept crashing with unknown error, nothing in the logs and nothing working.
Then I installed a fresh install of windows 2008 with all service packs in the virtual environment - and again installed sharepoint. Again - same symptoms - the site crashes and works SLOWLY.
Finally today I gave up and installed the entire 2010 beta system on my laptop itself - on the windows 7. Apart from the fact that I had to download and install the prerequisites manually (on the server it did it automatically for me) and apart from the fact that I didn't follow the instructions very well (I used 7-zip to extract the .exe file so I can change the config.xml file - which put all files in the one folder - losing the hierarchy. it turns out this gives a "wrong language" error (I forget the exact syntax)) the installation went quickly and easily - so now I have a stand alone windows 7 with sharepoint 2010 and office 2010 and VS2010.
I will keep updating when I have time to play with all of the above...