Recently, Shai Raiten has blogged about installing SharePoint on Windows 7 (or Vista). This works for SharePoint 2007, but (at least for me) failed for SharePoint 2010.

However, there is an easy way to install SharePoint 2010 on client OSs (Windows 7 x64, Windows Vista x64):

1. Extract/copy the SharePoint installation to somewhere on the hard drive.

2. Open config.xml file located in the Files\Setup subfolder.

3. Add the line

<Setting Id="AllowWindowsClientInstall" Value="True"/>

before the closing </configuration> element, and that’s it!

Run setup.exe in the usual way.