Can Win2k users now test under IE7?
Microsoft’s recent announcement about making a free XP image for VirtualPC available for testing has raised an interesting question. As VirtualPC is available for Windows 2000 users (and XP is not) does this mean that Windows 2000 users can now download the free Windows XP image for testing that Microsoft has made available and upgrade the bundled IE6 to IE7 and therefore be able to legally test IE7 under XP from a Win2k machine without needing to buy a separate XP licence?
If this is the case this would be great news for companies that don’t want to upgrade to XP or Vista any time soon but do need to test their websites under IE7.
Any experiences with this please leave your comments
UPDATE: Reading some articles in Slashdot it appears that the WinXP virtual image does not validate as ‘Genuine Windows’ so will not allow installation of IE7 on the image. So it looks like the only way to install IE7 on this image would be to bypass the WGA verification. Of course doing that would be of questionable legality.