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Comment by acqq | Hacker News Reader

IE6 on Windows XP is 1 GB zipped. Microsoft Edge containing VM is 5 GB zipped.

All VMs expire:

"Please note that these virtual machines expire after 90 days. We recommend setting a snapshot when you first install the virtual machine which you can roll back to later."

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They expire but you can, and they advise you to, snapshot and roll back. The purpose is to stop you just using it as a windows vm for doing work on.

This is probably obvious but worth noting anyway: remember to do the snapshot before you start the VM. The expiry countdown starts the first time you boot the VM and is date-based so the VM will expire even if you only used it once.

On the other hand, having a snapshot in a booted state gets you up and testing much quicker for subsequent runs. Even if it will expire after a while, you'll get one hour of work in before windows shuts down, and then you just restore the snapshot again.

Really? I'm pretty sure at least one of the VMs was completely locked down when booted up after it had expired. Not sure which version of Windows that was, though.

That said, what I generally do is to simply suspend the VM instead of resetting it to the snapshot. Then when it expires I can still do a reset to the snapshot to reset the expiry.

I generally boot at least the IE8 VM up before using it in order to install basic things like the Flash player (to test the Flash fallback for HTML5 media players).

That's what I meant :) You can't reboot after expiration.

What is the difference between saving the original ZIP file and doing the snapshot before starting the VM?

I think you need to do an import first, so it is faster to just rollback to a snapshot than re-import each time. I prefer snapshots so I can configure the network as needed for our corporate environment (saving me from doing that each and every time).

If you save the zip file you need to do the following:

1. extract the VM bundle

2. install and configure the VM (this is automated but can take up to several minutes)

3. boot up the VM

By using a snapshot you skip steps 1 and 2 and resetting a snapshot is pretty much instant, so you're only left with step 3.

The windows 7 ones allow you to re-arm the activation a number of times (I think it's up to 5 times?) using the `slmgr /rearm` command.

Does the windows 10 one not have this facility?

If I remember correctly you can in win7/8/8.1 and 2008/2012/2012R2, even the rearm limit I think there is a way to avoid it.

I have no shortage of disk space so I just keep the Zip files in the same folder as the VMs. Then when they expire it's a simple matter of extracting the Zip overwriting the files. This works nicely with Virtual PC because any virtual hardware configs made to the VM are kept external from the image and aren't overwritten.

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