Hacker News Reader

Comment by raddevon | Hacker News Reader

I notice on the page they have licensing that supersedes the Windows licensing included with the VMs. Unfortunately, I've had these VMs for a while, and they've been complaining for activation. So, although they have provided different licensing terms, they didn't bother to inform the software of this fact.

View on HN

This is damn annoying. We downloaded a whole set of them and after a bit they all died so you have to download them again periodically.

Not a viable solution.

In the end we just set up an activated VM (using MSDN licenses) with RDP enabled for each config on a Win 8.1 HyperV machine that sits in the corner of the office.

I consider IE testing and support as an extra feature in all my projects, and am quite happy to bill an extra hour for setting waiting to download and setting up VMs.

Agreed. Also, there's nothing stopping you from automating that re-download-install-launch and charging the hour for that.

I usually snapshot the VM states before first boot, and restore to that when activation runs out (annoying, but beats re-downloading everything).

If I recall correctly, some of them even come with instructions for re-arming the activation timer, which can get you a bit more time out of them.

I've found that booting the virtualbox VMs and then snapshotting them in a running state is pretty convenient. Restore to snapshot on every use, and you'll get at least an hour out of each session, resetting every time. Also the startup time is near instant.

The ievms installer (https://github.com/xdissent/ievms) automatically takes a clean snapshot on install, which allows you to restore to a blank "just installed" state, resetting the licensing timer in the process.

Still frustrating, but work-arounds are there if needed.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com