Creation of Test Environment

I am in the process of setting up a test environment for SD+, our live is getting too big and busy to be using for my fiddling etc..

I have a few questions:

Is it possible to have this setup on a Windows XP Pro machine with SQL Server 2005?

When I restore database, will this also bring across the settings of SD+, like Mail fetch etc, or will this all need to be setup if needed?

I have installed the same version of SQL etc as LIVE server etc, but the live server is not running XP pro but Windows server, will this be a close enough mimic of live to test updates etc and be happy with passed test results in test to then implement in Live, or is it too far removed fom each other?

Hope you can help