Microsoft Rant – Virtual Office/VMWare and IE6

Why is everything Microsoft related so freaking difficult??

Today I go to download Virtual PC because I need to test an application in IE6 and since you can’t download IE6 and IE7 on the same machine (without some issues) I decide to try Virtual PC…

I prefer VMWare but I found a post on their site that they had some issues getting the IE6 .vhd file working – who would have guessed!

So I:

Google “Virtual PC”
Click the link to the Microsoft site
On the next page there are no less than 4 links to download ‘something’
I take a gamble and click “get free download”
I’m taken to another page with at least 3 “download” buttons or links
I click “Microsoft Download Center”
On this page I can “search downloads”, “download below”, see “What Others Are Downloading” and FINALLY near the bottom of the page is a button to download the 32 BIT\setup.exe.

Whew.

I won’t bore you with the details I had to go through to get the IE6.vhd image file – it involved Windows Genuine Validation something or other and required me to download and install something else!!

Now I just have to install and hope it works (doubtful at this point)…

4 thoughts on “Microsoft Rant – Virtual Office/VMWare and IE6”

Don’t forget, the IE6Test.vhd file Microsoft provides (it has an install of XP/IE6 on it for easy IE6 testing) expires on March 31st. After that you won’t be able to boot it.

I was really impressed they were providing that until I found out it expired in a month.

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