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.

Creating backups of computer data is nothing new. Each year new techniques and software emerge making it easier for non-geeks to implement backup techniques and automate them. Most businesses and many households use a backup strategy that involves backing up to another computer on the network or even online. I’ll call the computer that needs data backed up the “client” and the computer that is storing the data as a backup the “server” or “remote volume.”

Sometimes the automated connection between the client and server fails. In Mac OS X, I’ve found two different causes for this and below are the fixes for each. I’ve seen reports of these issues occuring with Apple’s Time Machine, Carbon Copy Cloner, Super Duper, Deja Vu and other backup utilties. These issues can also occur with Apple’s Time Capsule.

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The last time I posted results was a few months ago. I’ve still been testing all three. Recently I completed network transfer tests. For these tests, I used Vista Ultimate SP1 with Parallels 3 and Fusion 2.

This time the MBP was configured with 4GB of RAM. I had 2GB allocated to the VM. Fusion had both cores selected, and Parallels was set to be optimized for the VM. I also disabled App Sharing in Parallels as it created massive performance issues in previous tests. I did not install MacFuse as Fusion prompted.

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