I have recently purchased a new Windows 7 machine. The official reason is to learn photoshop, but really it is to play games.
One of the things I wanted to do is to learn WordPress. On my Mac it gets a bit technical to install if you stick with the standard tools (OS Xs Built in Apache, PHP and downloading MySQL)
I was expecting something much worse for Windows, especially since it is not a unix environment. Imagine my surprise when I got it up and running in 15 minutes using Microsoft products (legally and free!)
The new product is aimed at beginning web developers and is called WebMatrix. I was most impressed. It installed WordPress 3.01 without any trouble, downloaded PHP and MySQL
When I visted my new local wordpress install, I upgraded by the wordpress update function. It worked flawlessly.
References
http://drewby.com/2010/08/a-wordpress-blog-in-15-minutes-with-webmatrix/
Do a google search for “webmatrix wordpress”