gtuhl: startup IT and software development

I posted recently about tentatively moving to a macbook pro after using Windows and/or Linux for many years. At this point in time I don’t see myself ever switching back. I’ve rearranged my work environment to eliminate the Linux desktop, my old Dell laptop is collecting dust, and now I just have my macbook with a 2nd monitor attached.

In any case, I needed a way to test stuff I am working on in both IE6 and IE7. My macbook came with Parallels and Vista so IE7 was no problem but for whatever weird reason there is no way (that I have found) to run IE6 in Vista. I tried following the directions all over about running Virtual PC 2007 but my plans of running a virtual machine inside of a virtual machine didn’t pan out. It gave me some error about the CPU architecture being invalid or some such.

The solution is actually pretty straight forward, and if you don’t have the benefit of Vista and IE7 already accessible it can be used to get that as well. The only downside is it does require Parallels (which costs some small chunk of money) and the whole process of needing virtual machines to test does feel a bit heavy - though I suppose far less heavy than having another machine to test on.

The easiest way to go would be to buy Parallels, buy a copy of XP, and then create 2 virtual machines from it with one remaining at IE6 and the other being upgraded to IE7.

The potentially cheaper alternative follows:

• Go buy and install Parallels. It is a great piece of software that makes working with any virtual machines you have open far more pleasant than other virtualization tools I have used.
• Using a windows machine, go to this Microsoft page to get free Virtual PC hard disk images for XP with IE6 or XP with IE7. It is actually pretty reasonable of Microsoft to provide these but they are self-extracting EXE files thus the need to do this step on Windows. Sure would be nice if they had used a plain old zip file instead. It appears the images expire quarterly so you will have to redo this process a few times each year.
• Extract the VPC image by running the EXE file on a windows machine.
• Copy the VPC image to your mac on a CD or flash key or something.
• Run Parallels Transporter, it came with Parallels.
• Select ‘Express’
• Select ‘From Virtual Computer’
• Select ‘Single Virtual Disk’
• Browse to your VPC image, hit ‘Migrate,’ and let it crank.
• When it is done you will want to choose the option to make it bootable and here it will ask for the installation media. I realize this step sucks and probably makes this process invalid for most people but at a company this works fine. You just need the installation files, it doesn’t use the activations so any XP cd you have lying around should suffice.
• From here it should fire up the virtual machine and you are set.

I realize that second to last step makes this a bit of a bummer, but still in an environment where an XP cd is available it works just fine. For a company this can make a lot of sense because XP activations don’t get used up for these free images so you can provide IE6 and IE7 to any employees running on OSX without having to purchase windows licenses.