So anyway, I figured that with the stories getting around regarding the recent PDC that there would be Virtual Machines of Windows 7 being handed out on the portable Hard drives that it wouldn't take long for them to appear on Torrent sites etc... And so it would appear ;-) Download 64-bit Windows 7 6801 Pre-Beta ISO (Microsoft.Windows.7.64Bit.Build.6801.DVD-WinBeta Torrent)
So I started looking around to see how easy this might be to crank up under the old trusty VMware Workstation 6 (I really have been slack, haven't I, must update that shortly?) and this again didn't take long at all to find an authoritive article that shows the only real thing that needs to be set is the HDD to IDE as opposed to SCSI? Windows 7 + VMWare 6/VMWare Fusion 2
So this only left the possibility of the O/S complaining about needing to be activated, blah, blah, so I was wondering if this might be able to be bypassed as I was only curious about checking it out - not necessarily running the O/S on hardware anytime soon, and I turned this article out that solves that quite neatly at 15 Windows 7 Pre-Release Preview MAK Unlimited Activation Product Keys
All in all, this might take you about a hour or two after you have finished downloading to install and start testing Windows 7 - happy trails? :-)