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Comment by dstein | Hacker News Reader

I'm still trying to decide how I want to install it. Being able to test all versions of IE on a single machine is getting impossible.

I have a Windows 7 virtual machine for testing IE8, a Vista vm for IE7, and an Windows XP for testing IE6. And I only have one license of each system, and I don't really want to drop my ability to test IE7 or IE8.

Fuck you Microsoft!!

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Do you know that Microsoft supplies VHD images for free that you can use to test any version of IE? YOu don't need a license or anything, just Windows and their free Virtual PC software. They're intended to work only with Windows and Virtual PC (of course!) but apparently it's possible to get them to work with other VM software on other OSs.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyId=...

> YOu don't need a license or anything, just Windows and their free Virtual PC software.

Last time I checked, running "just Windows" requires "a license or something".

It's true. I meant to say a license specifically for these additional versions.

Cool, but it seems that I can use them for only 2 weeks ("Expires October 1, 2010") or 90 days ("Expires 90 days after first run.").

They supply new ones every 90 days or so.

Which is great if you want to do completely unnecessary admin work every 90 days.

All you need to do is download the new images. I mean, this entire thing is a huge PITA anyway, so as far as testing sites for IE6 and IE7, this is the least of your worries! I'm just pointing out is that it is possible to use this product continuously.

Cool, no I didn't know about these. But I'm on MacOSX and use Parallels. I'm not sure if Parallels supports these types of images.

They used to work in VMWare/etc if you converted the VHD files, but for the last several months the new ones MS has been providing are made to only work with VirtualPC on Windows.

I know the feeling, but they're stuck too--they want XP to go away and can't get rid of that either.

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