Since my SharePoint 2010 technical preview installation under VMware isn't exactly the fastest thing i decided to go on and install the beta directly onto the Windows 7 64bit running on my Thinkpad T61.
Not needing to run a virtual pc saves a lot of overhead, and since my laptop only has 4GB of ram this helps a lot.

Installing SharePoint 2010 is easy, but compared to a normal, supported, installation a few extra steps are required:

• Extract the Sharepoint image
• Download and install the prerequisites manually
• Add a setting to config.xml in order to allow installation on a client os
• Manually activate the required windows features
• Install the FIX FOR: WCF: Sharepoint Shared Services Roll-up update

If you skip installing the WCF fix the SharePoint 2010 Products Configuration Wizard will throw an "Unrecognized attribute 'allowInsecureTransport' error

You can now install SharePoint 2010 on your Windows 7 (or Vista SP1) based workstation. According to Microsoft a standalone installation is the only option, but a quick search on Google will reveil that this is not entirely true, and since installing on a client os isn't supported anyway...

References:

• MSDN Setting Up the Development Environment for SharePoint Server
• MSDN Blog Installation notice for the SharePoint Server Public Beta on Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 and Microsoft Windows 7

Microsoft just released the second beta of IE8, which is described on the download site as "Faster, Easier, More Private, and More Secure."

The new features are Compatibility View, InPrivate Browsing, Accelerators, Web Slices, SmartScreen Filter and Search Suggestions.
The compatibility view enables you to switch between the available render modes (Quircks mode, IE7 mode and IE8 Standards compliance mode).
With the press of a button you can enter InPrivate Browsing mode, in this mode IE doesn't save things like url history, cookies, forms autocomplete information etc.

The standard IE8 beta 2 download replaces IE7 on your pc so i installed a version from The Internet Explorer Collection. This download contains standalone installations for all IE versions, including the new IE8 Beta2.
I've already experienced the first crash, but thats might be a good thing since automatic crash recovery is one of the other improved area's of IE8

Update: after installing the béta the popup-blocker is screwed in both IE7 & IE8. De-installing the béta from the Internet Explorer Collection and installing the "normal" IE8 beta fixed this. The disadvantage is that i've now lost IE7, but so far IE8 seems to be working ok.