ie6 on S Anand

Windows XP virtual machine

Sun, 16 Sep 2012 09:05:50 +0000

Here’s the easiest way to set up a Windows XP virtual machine that I could find.

(This is useful if you want to try out programs without installing it on your main machine; test your code on a new machine; or test your website on IE6 / IE7 / IE8.)

Go to the Virtual PC download site. (I tried VirtualBox and VMWare Player. Virtual PC is better if you’re running Windows on Windows.)

If you have Windows 7 Starter or Home, select “Don’t need XP Mode and want VPC only? Download Windows Virtual PC without Windows XP Mode.”
If you have Windows Vista or Windows 7, select “Looking for Virtual PC 2007?”
Download it. (You may have to jump through a few hoops like activation.)
Download Windows XP and run it to extract the files. (It’s a 400MB download.)
Open the “Windows XP.vmc” file – just double-clicking ought to work. At this point, you have a working Windows XP version. (The Administrator password is “Password1”.)
Under Tools – Settings – Networking – Adapter 1, select “Shared Networking (NAT)”

That’s pretty much it. You’ve got a Windows XP machine running inside your other Windows machine.

Update (18 Sep 2012): I noticed something weird. The memory usage of VMWindow and vpc.exe is tiny!

Between the two processes, they take up less than 30MB of memory. This is despite the Windows XP Task Manager inside the virtual machine showing me 170MB of usage. I’ve no clue what’s happening, but am beginning to enjoy virtualisation. I’ll start up a few more machines, and perhaps install a database cluster across them.

Comments

Vivek T 16 Sep 2012 6:53 pm: I agree that Virtual PC is the easiest to use. However, Microsoft has stopped all development on it for about 2 years now. We use Virtualbox since it’s open-source and provides access to virtually all USB devices connected to the host and also provides 2D & 3D graphics acceleration.
Fuu 9 May 2013 11:42 pm: how do you download windows xp.vmc file?

IE6 in Corporates

Wed, 17 Jun 2009 09:13:03 +0000

PPK’s State of the Browser – IE Edition mentions one reason why IE6 will probably stay on for a while.

Now why do I expect IE6 to stick around while IE7 goes down? The answer is simple: Intranets… many office workers will continue to be condemned to IE6.

At work, that is. It’s quite likely that on their private computer at home they run another browser — IE7 or 8, Firefox, or maybe one of the smaller ones.

… Basically, most of the IE6 market share comes from office-hour surfing, while it drops significantly in the after-hours period.

I checked the numbers on my site. It’s bang on. Last month, the percentage of IE6 users around noon was a little over 40%. At midnight, the percentage was 20%.

Percentage of IE6 users over a 24-hour window

Given that the bulk of my audience is from India, I would assume that these statistics are probably representative of Indian corporates. But I guess it means that there’s a fair bit of music listening happening at work. Probably a good thing.

Comments

Karthik A 17 Jun 2009 5:03 pm: Yes, even our corporate IT deploys IE6. In fact , many of our enterprise apps support only IE6. Personally, I have upgraded and find that Javascripts that are unresponsive in IE8 and Chrome dont actually throw up that error in IE6.
ppk 18 Jun 2009 2:43 pm: Thanks for these figures! It’s good to have some actual data to point at, even though it’s anecdotal. Added link to main article.
Thejesh GN 8 Jul 2009 2:03 pm: Interesting stats. I need to check my stats.
Naveen Arur 13 Jul 2009 10:14 am: Bang on target. Fortunately, my organization, which can be counted as large one, has woken up and we are moving forward(if there is such a thing with Microsoft) to IE 7 by end of the year….which also means more work for me to check if my applications work on IE7.
Khair 22 Sep 2009 3:06 pm: The reason why corporates don’t adapt to the changes is because of money invovled in upgrading. They have an awful time and money in making legacy applications compatible with new version of IE!!

IE6

Thu, 30 Aug 2001 12:00:00 +0000

IE6 is out with new features. My site has already had quite a few hits with people using IE6! BTW, it doesn’t have Java or Plugin support.

Internet Explorer 6 preview

Sun, 01 Apr 2001 12:00:00 +0000

The preview release of Internet Explorer 6 is out.

Internet Explorer 6 sneak preview

Sat, 03 Feb 2001 12:00:00 +0000

A sneak preview of MS IE6. What is worrying is that Microsoft may not release IE6 as a standalone application. They’re planning to bundle it with their next OS: Whister.