While waiting a delivery (still waiting) of a Virtual PC 3 to help with the browser/email client issue, I have been testing a bit. The ability to get a secondhand Mac that is fast in 7.6.1 for a very low price or free and nicely working software does not count much for a person who cannot check emails or pay bills with it. I have had a hard time recommending it to my friends, as they are not interested in computers and just want things to work. The only fun thing was that as a Mac-based UNIX developer I had many versions of Windows and many versions of Linux installed on my MacBook, but only one installation of OSX -) Some people also thought it was fun to see a 'Mac developer' with 'MSDN subscription', but whatever gets the work done, is the way to go.Internet Explorer 5.1.7 works in OS 7.6.1!īrowsers and email clients are a problem in Mac OS 7.6.1, no matter how fine it is otherwise. MSDN has a cost (on the order of $1k/year) but was worth it to get access to everything for development and testing purposes. MSDN has different options, 'OS only' would be probably enough for this need (I had other needs for Windows development tools as well so got the full MSDN). I would say that virtual machine installations are a must so you get the exact complete real thing. certain old Windows Server with certain IE version, etc to replicate the environment for testing and regression testing.

This allows you to install the exact version some customer happens to have, e.g. You can install those you need in separate Parallels virtual machines (VMWare and virtualbox would work as well). One option is to join MSDN (Microsoft Developer Network subscription) to get access to all Windows versions in all languages etc. Microsoft obviously isn't giving away fully-fledged Windows copies for free :) You'll need something like 40GB free to download, unpack and convert the Windows Vista and Windows 7 images (once you're done, you can of course toss a bunch of stuff out again)Įdit: Oh, yeah, forgot to mention: The Windows images last about 3 months at a time before they lock down completely, and you have to download a fresh copy. Just know that many of the Windows images are huge. Import the resulting virtual machine image into Parallels, and you're done rar instead, and unpack with anything that can extract RAR files But that can be done too:ĭownload free Windows virtual machines directly from Microsoft made specifically for this purpose. But if you need to fully test and debug, you need Windows. If you just need to see what a site looks like, will do the trick. First: Look at the question linked to in the comments.

Install internet explorer on mac