With the release of Internet Explorer 8 yesterday, Microsoft refreshed the VirtualPC images they provide for compatiblity testing. Along with the previous IE6 and IE7 images, there is now also an image just for IE8. Oddly enough, they didn’t seem to refresh the “time bomb” expiration date of April 30, 2009 – just over a month away. There is a Vista image for IE7, which expires 120 days after first run.

On a related note, the stock prices of RAM manufactures saw a nice increase yesterday. Ok, so I’m only kidding. If you didn’t know, this solution means you have to run yet another instance of Windows on your computer.

You don’t like/wont/can’t run VirtualPC you say? There are methods to convert the images to other formats used by other virtual machines. There are other hacks that allow you to run multiple versions of IE on the same Windows install. However, with each of them I have found descrepencies. As any good tester knows, inaccurate testing enviroments are not worth.

If you experience problems with the MS site, you may find yourself needing to use IE7 to get around.