
Check out this sick system:
Quad Core Laptop w/ all the trimmings...I don't think this will make it in the "Year of living frugally"! I customized mine and it came out to $4400...What do you get?
Installing Server 2008 and Exchange 2007 on VMware Workstation 6.0...
Nathan Winters on msexchange.org has a great article on the installation
Being a guy who doesn't like to read the manual, I tried this the old fashin way, and I spent a half a day working on this including one complete infrastructure build. It did finally work with no issues.

Comments
Knocked $600 off my config. YMMV. I'm pretty sure it's the same laptop. I guess it's still a bit excessive.