IE VPC | Internet Explorer Virtual PC

Either you are a Web Designer, a Web Developer, or a Tester. Eventually you will face the same problem, you will need to test your websites against different version of browsers. And IE has always been the hectic one due to its dependent on Operating System and the older version being prone to more issues than other browsers.

Microsoft has been gentle enough to offer VHD (Virtual Hard Disk) format of IE bundled along its compatible OS (e.g. Windows XP, Vista, 7, etc). The images provided are patched with the latest security updates and are otherwise clean installs of the OS with very few modifications.

The download page contains different VPC (Virtual PC) images, depending on what you want to test. But do note that these images are designed to run on Microsoft Virtual PC, thus may not work in other hosting environment.

Do note the big window company released this as a testing environment and should not be use as normal machine. Thus below are some of the limitation that Microsoft put in place:

The password to login to all of these images is Password1 and the username will be present when you first login.

*Note: You may be required to activate the OS as the product key has been deactivated. This is the expected behavior. The VHDs will not pass genuine validation. Immediately after you start the Windows 7 or Windows Vista images they will request to be activated. You can cancel the request and it will login to the desktop. You can activate up to two “rearms” (type slmgr –rearm at the command prompt) which will extend the trial for another 30 days each time OR simply shutdown the VPC image and discard the changes you’ve made from undo disks to reset the image back to its initial state.  By doing either of these methods, you can technically have a base image which never expires although you will never be able to permanently save any changes on these images for longer than 90 days.

More details can be found in the URL:  Internet Explorer Application Compatibility VPC Image