As such, installing and uninstalling all these different firewalls would have eventually had a negative impact on my native operating system (for various reasons). For example, not to long ago, I was testing various application firewalls to replace an older discontinued application firewall. This technique is called “sandboxing” because it allows you to isolate what you’re testing inside its own enclosed environment (or “box”). So, whenever I find myself needing to guide users over the phone through a series of steps that may vary from operating system to operating system, I find that having these virtual images available helps considerably.Ī third benefit is that virtual images allow you to have a place to test software that you may not necessarily want to test in a live environment or on your native operating system. For example, if you only have IE8 installed, IETester can only work with IE engines up to IE8.Ī side benefit to having the different operating systems available is that if you do any sort of tech support, it’s likely that your users/clients use different versions of Windows.

Additionally, IETester only works with the highest version of IE that you have installed. While IETester offers a quick way to test websites with the various IE browser engines, it’s still not as good as having the real thing to work with. Each platform has a version of the Internet Explorer browser available. These images offer Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows 7. When the last set of images expired in the beginning of November, the new images weren’t available until mid-December. Note that if you find yourself depending on these images more and more, it seems to take about a month or so for Microsoft to update the images after the expiration date, so keep that in mind when that time of the year comes. Microsoft released their new images and can be found here: I have been using Microsoft’s free virtual machine images for a few years now for browser testing and to help me navigate the various operating systems when a user calls me for support.

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