Free Windows XP-10 VirtualBox/Parallels Images from Microsoft

[taspeotis]

Microsoft have been offering virtual machines for years now [1].

I know they offered Virtual PC and VirtualBox previously, is the news that Parallels is now supported?

[1] http://superuser.com/q/109944/23461

[Dolores12]

they used to have a website made especially for that at https://modern.ie

[jagtesh]

Nope. They've offered Parallels for years too.

[nailer]

If you're on a Mac and want to use OS X's inbuilt virtualization, the VMware Fusion images work on Veertu.

[ac29]

Correction: free limited Windows VM images for testing Microsoft browsers.

You can't just throw these on a copy of your favorite virtualization platform and have a free copy of Windows to legally do whatever you'd like with, indefinitely.

[TheLogothete]

As far as I know, people from Microsoft recommend to snapshot the images and just roll back to avoid the 90 period.

[godzillabrennus]

Indeed. Better off using http://browserling.com to test.

[donatj]

I've used these for years in Web Development, they're invaluable.

[trm42]

So the main point seems to be MS has killed modern.ie -site and redirect to this dev.windows.com site. Still useful once in a while although the big disk images are PITA to download and setup. I have better uses for my laptop SSD than to fill it with different IEs and Windowses :p

[dzhiurgis]

XP is 1.25GB while W7 is 4GB. That is nothing compared to how useful they are every so often.

[stephenr]

Depending on your model of laptop, you can probably get reasonable speed from expansion storage for rarely used images like these.

I opted for the 128GB SSD in my MBP (last 17" model, from late 2011) and a few years later I added a 128GB ExpressCard SSD, which i use pretty much exclusively for (largely Linux, largely via Vagrant) Virtual Machine images. Sure, I'll definitely order a bigger built-in SSD on the replacement, but on a newer machine without ExpressCard you could also use a USB3 flash drive or (if you are on a mac) a Thunderbolt SSD device.

[hexsprite]

I use a service like browserstack instead for the occasions I need to test on IE

[bluedino]

I setup a server with 16GB of RAM and a 480GB SSD, and installed 2 of each of these on the machine using VMware ESXi (the free version)

At the time we were supporting XP+IE6 for a client so this worked great for testing older browser versions, and prevented each developer from having to install their own local copies. Just RDP over to the test box...

[bigiain]

I know I'm old, but a 5Gig download just to run Edge on OS X? (And that's a 5Gug zipfile, I wonder how much of my SSD that's gonna eat unzipped?)

In the plus side, Chrome says "6 minutes left", and I've only just clicked download. I suspect my network bandwidth improvements over the years make this no less an imposition than the outrageous 200+Kb download for Doom over a 14.4k modem...)

[skrebbel]

Oh poor you. If I want to test my app on OSX safari I have to either buy a mac or find a hipster.

[dave2000]

> I know I'm old, but a 5Gig download just to run Edge on OS X?

Yeah, old. To scale it back to olden days disk space and bandwidth, it's like downloading a 20 meg file which deflates into a 50 meg file on disk.

[j-b]

I remember downloading the doom.wad from a local BBS. Ran out of disk space. Deleted command.com in order to free up space. Oops.

[bluedino]

Remember that it's the OS and the browser, not just the browser.

And things like Windows 7+IE8 will show different bugs from Windows XP+IE8

[ojii]

My issue is that it's a single file. If you have a network hiccup during that 5G download, have fun re-downloading it. I wish they offered torrents...

[danielrm26]

What's the licensing situation for these VMs?

What can I use them for, for how long, and what limitations are in place?

[pmalynin]

90 days. Also "You may use the software for testing purposes only. You may not use the software for commercial purposes. You may not use the software in a live operating environment. "

From: https://modernievirt.blob.core.windows.net/vhd/release_notes...

[rms_returns]

Even if the licensing terms were liberal, are you going to use an OS that hasn't been issued system updates since ages? It will be riddled with malware the moment you connect to the Internet!

[orionblastar]

90 day limited demo version of Windows. Make sure you back up the original image in case your demo expires and you need to restore the image from the original.

I remember Microsoft used to offer ISOS of Windows with a 90 day limited trial key. There was a utility that would reset the demo clock as well as a command line option to reset it for another 90 days.

[skrause]

I made a snapshot before booting the image for the first time and simply restore to that snapshot when the trial expires.

[snowpanda]

Haven't used Windows in a while, but I think it used to be: Command Prompt -> slmgr -rearm

[trentmb]

Can I register a valid XP key with it?

[ikeboy]

You can rearm these VMs as IIRC up to 180 days.

[8draco8]

On a OSX/Linux I was always using https://github.com/xdissent/ievms to get Windows VM that I want.

[rossy]

It's probably not the intended use case, but I use these more often for testing desktop applications than for testing web pages. It's a shame there's no 64-bit VMs.

[TorKlingberg]

There is no IE11 on Windows 10 VM. It seems Microsoft are very committed to Edge. Or is this to avoid misuse of the testing VMs?

[jayflux]

It wouldn't make sense as most users would never use ie 11 on Windows 10. It's possible, but it's hidden in the menu. Just get an Edge for Windows 10 VM and use the IE 11 on that, it should be there.

[brian-armstrong]

I used the Edge image to test Web Audio in Edge and it was perfect. I was able to test my entire web app.

[ubanholzer]

if you want to use it with Vagrant: https://github.com/whatwedo/vagrant-ievms

[ck2]

Can the vmware converter make these work?

[michaelbuddy]

are these still time limited? Because I'd rather have the desktop with feature limits than time limits. Having to reinstall the VM because of a 30-day limit is just a waste of time.

[mozumder]

These don't "auto-update" to the latest Edge browser, do they?

[chris_wot]

Ah, hopefully one day the ReactOS project will be sufficient and not require these dodgy VMs.

In particular, I'd love to install ReactOS and build LibreOffice, er, natively.

[wyuenho]

At some point someone is going to have ask the questions: Who is gaming HN, why is this news and at the top spot of HackerNews? MS has been offering this for years and yet every once in a while I see posts similar to this on the front page.

[minitech]

Surprisingly, not everyone is aware of everything that has ever been on the front page of HN.