I listened to a great Pixel8 podcast over the weekend.  It was one in which Craig Shoemaker interviewed Pete LePage on the subject of the Top Web Design Mistakes.  During the interview, Pete mentioned that there was a place on the Microsoft web site that you could download Virtual PC Images of XP/Vista  with the different versions of Internet Explorer ( IE6, IE7 or IE8 ) installed.  When I heard this, I thought to myself, what a cool idea.  You could test your web site and see how it renders in the different versions.

I downloaded the VPC image with XP/IE8 and played with it some.  It is (of course) a trial version of the OS.  At this point, the ones available for download expire in early September.  The images are rather large, but I highly recommend downloading and giving them a try.

Virtual PC Images with different versions of IE for testing
Pete LePage’s Blog