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Using Microsoft Virtual Machine for Testing

I learned something new this past week: how to use Microsoft Virtual PC to test Internet Explorer. If you've been a web developer for some time then you know that it's hard to get multiple versions of IE running on the same Windows computer. My solution for this has been to keep a legacy computer around that has IE 6 on it, but when that computer died on me I had to find a different solution.

A friend tipped me off to using the virtual machine and it turns out that it works pretty good. Leave it up to Microsoft to make it a huge resource hog though. I have a new laptop with an intel processor and 6GB of ram and it's still slow. I recommend that when you install it you pump up the ram on as much as you can - that speeds up things quite a bit (the default is only 128MB). Also, getting networking to work is easy if you know what to do. See the 2nd screen shot to explain.
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