The best suited free tool for creating virtual PC in this sense also comes from Microsoft and is of course the free Virtual PC 2007. All you will have to do is download the files, expand the virtual hard disks and then point Virtual PC 2007 to the virtual machine images.
Microsoft is offering three VPC Hard Disk images of Free Windows XP that was designed for testing websites on Internet Explorer on Windows XP SP3. The VPC images contain a standard copy of Windows XP Service Pack 3 pre-configured in accordance with Internet Explorer 6, 7 or IE 8 Beta 2. All copies of Free Windows XP SP 3 have been pre-activated so users will be able to access the latest updates from Microsoft. However, neither version will pass the Windows Genuine Advantage validation mechanism. This is why, in order to access downloads that require WGA validation users will have to use a genuine copy of Windows to download the products and then transfer them inside the virtual machine.
After extraction you will already have the virtual hard disks so you just have to create the virtual machines for them. For Windows XP a VM with 512 MB RAM is more than sufficient to get the job done. You will find that the operating system is optimized for running with hardware emulating technology but that you can also handle it as a normal installation of Windows. Still, testing purposes do come first and in this sense Microsoft has placed the IE7 Readiness Toolkit and the IE Developer Toolbar right on your desktop. You can also installing some application like Adobe Acrobat reader on this platform. Now IE6 and IE7 run side by side on Windows XP and Windows Vista on the same desktop. But just because the resource is aimed at web developers does not mean that you should stay away from it.
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