Me and colleagues hate IE testing. Today I finally caved in to come up with a virtual machine solution. I thought my findings were interesting so I'd share them.

To do this you will need
1) A windows machine with internet connection
2) A copy of the opensource virtual machine virtual box installed on the device you want to access ie6/7 etc
3) Some way of moving files from your windows machine to the machine with virtual box installed.
4) A windows xp/ vista cd

So now first things first move your arse down to microsoft virtual hard drive download page and download all the images of different IE versions you want to be able to test. Luckily they are all here, annoyingly they are all in unfriendly exe/rar formats. Fine if you want to run your virtual box on a windows machine, really unhelpful if you want to run your virtual box on a mac or linux machine. So this is where the window machine comes in. Download the files from this webpage to that machine, run them and the installer will spit out a vhd file (virtual hard drive). When done copy these on to a dvd or use a firewire cable/network/usb drive whatever and get those files on to the machine you want to run your vms.

Now we have a copy of virtual box and some vhd files. You can burn/hit with a hammer/explode your windows machine now if you care to. It's no longer needed in this process.

Now it's quite easy. Load virtual box, click the new button, click next and give it a name, then allocate it some size, and select use existing hard disk. The existing hard disk is your vhd file so point to that.

Repeat for all your virtual harddrives.
Now when you boot them you might require your windows xp cd to install additional drivers as I did (your network driver is probably the most essential here! :))

And that's it..
Web dev just got a lot easier (for me anyhow).