Have you considered running a P2V snap of your laptop as is? This might let you shrink the downtime required – vanilla windows, virtual server/VMWare and your virtual disk files = instant restore to your current environment. This means you’ll be able to work while getting your new environment set up just how you want it. You might not have access to all the hardware-level APIs you might be interested in using, but it will let you cut code, run SQL, etc…

Just a thought.

Jez