As a solution for something that’s way harder than it should be, Microsoft has released a virtual machine with Windows XP and Internet Explorer 6 & 7 preinstalled. The target for this is web developers who are looking to test their sites against both of the IE versions. The virtual machine has XP installed and pre-activated with expiration on April 1 2007.
It’s getting really interesting to see what Microsoft is doing with pre-built virtual machines. I hesitate to call these virtual appliances, but I suppose they are. I wonder if now that Windows Vista is released they’ll be a little more willing to allow Windows XP to float for this type of application. This release certainly sets an interesting precedent.
As a Macintosh user, testing in IE is really the only thing I need Windows for anymore, so this would be really useful if I didn’t already have an XP VM for that purpose. So far I haven’t seen anyone convert the VHD format release into something that will run under VMWare or Parallels on the Mac. Converting the format is easy, the question just comes with whether or not XP will stay activated with the different hardware abstraction. If anyone decides to try this, please leave a comment so we know if it works or not.
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