Create a virtual PC to test sites with IE 6 & 7

[Falesh]

Yesterday I got around to installing a virtual PC so I can test sites with IE 6 & 7 on the same machine. It was a bit of a pain finding the how-to's but once I found them the process was very easy:

First of all download and install VMWare player (free).

This tutorial details how to get VMWare player to boot up. One thing you need is a file that represents the hard drive, the tutorial has one for windows but for a larger selection of sizes check this site out.

The final thing you need to do is create an iso file of your windows CD. I used MagicISO, it's not free but you can use it on trial for a bit, long enough to create the ISO anyway.

Once you have done all that open VMWare player and install windows as normal. What I did to transfer files between the virtual machine and my pc was simply to set up a network on the virtual one and connect to it over that as you would a normal PC.

This is a safer way to test as the hacks that make both IE's install on the same PC don't behave 100% correctly.

[kev woodman]

You can install stand alone versions of IE on your normal machine anyway - there's a brilliant installer for it here. It can be a bit quirky, as you said, but the IE6 version is really stable.

Not that I'm knocking virtual machines. I run Suse 10.2 inside a VM at work because the sys admin gets twitchy about me installing it natively. And I managed to get OS X running inside a VM at home although the performance was horrible and it took hours of tweaking to get it to run at all. Worth it to see the face of my Mac owning friend though when I showed him the screenshots of OS X running on an XP desktop. Geek heaven

[Falesh]

I was thinking about using multiple stand alone versions, but I read of too many possible issues with slight differences. I would hate to have a small issue be the one that breaks a site's layout upon release.

The ironic thing is that it looks like you will need to buy a second license to install Vista on a virtual PC. So law abiding web developers will have to buy two licenses from MS to test IE 6 & 7. :p

[kev woodman]

The problems I've encountered with the stand alone versions have all been related to the stability - not to rendering e.g. you may find that the address bar is glitchy in a particular version.