[thelist] has anyone used MS VPC (was RE: Multiple IE's: 6 and 7)

[David Kaufman]

Hi Joel,

Joel D Canfield <joel at streamliine.com> wrote:
> kasimir-k revealed
> 
>> free of charge option MS's own VPC
> 
> anyone used VPC successfully? I have a machine I could muck with, but
> I'd rather not if it's just going to cause me pain

It's working out great for me on a going-on two year old laptop (Pentium M 1.6GHz cpu + 1.5G RAM).  I tried a couple of the multiple-IE configurations but IE6 was never quite right.  It had cookie problems, opacity display problems... so I just went the MS-supported route described on the MSDN IE blog here
http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2006/11/30/ie6-and-ie7-running-on-a-single-machine.aspx

which is essentially: upgraded to IE7 + install MS Virtual PC 2004 (now permanently free) and MSDN's "pre-activated Windows XP SP2, IE6" virtual machine image.

It's cool that VPC is now and forever free (how un-Microsoftlike of them!) and even cooler that MSDN followed that trick with a license-hassle-free copy of XP that web developers can (finally) use to do their job and code new sites for FF + IE7 but maintain backwards compatibility with IE6. 

I leave the VPC running (in the task tray) most of the time -- its speed is not great but fine for me, since I all I use it for is a big virtualized IE6 browser :-).  VPC's decent performance, price tag and the legal XP image made this a better choice for me than the other virtualization options.

Note that Installing VPC requires installing Microsoft's anti-piracy programs and plugins.  The "Windows Genuine Advantage plug-in" setup files and a GenuineCheck.exe program litter the download directory I used for this install.  So if you're planning to install it on a second PC (or do a fresh install of XP, make sure it is correctly "activated" an all that first.

-dave