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Similarly, IE9 allows you to select IE7, IE8, IE9, and IE9 Compatibility Mode. In my experience these browser modes are not identical to their stand-alone counterparts. If you are serious about finding and fixing layout bugs for IE7/IE8 users, you really should roll an XP VM for each of those browsers. Notably, IE8 users commonly browse in IE8 Compatibility Mode which has its own quirks as well, and it's completely unavailable in IE9.

I wish I didn't have to know this stuff.

Even Microsoft can't work with IE6. It really is incredible how almost a decade of stagnation and bad ideas, as well as poor corporate policies, hurt the web and IE for so long.

Careful, you'll be updating your VM to a preview.

Might want to wait on that a bit.

He can always update a copy of the VM.

That's the beauty of virtual machines. You take a snapshot, you experiment to your heart's content. You don't like where you are, one click and 3 seconds later, you're back to where you started with absolutely zero data loss.

Zero data loss? All the data generated post snapshot will be gone.

Right, but for a test VM (my case), that doesn't matter.