20080414

Building on Julien's experience (following a vodka diner at Slawek's), I am wandering in the world of virtualization for the first time.

I installed VirtualBox on my Ubuntu box and Windows XP SP3 in a virtual machine. It was so easy to do it is not funny and the best part (not from a MS point of view I am sure) is that the virtualized XP feels faster than the native Vista I have installed in dual boot.

It even boots faster :P

Next time I need to jump back in the Windows world I'll go the virtual machine way but I'll have to keep the dual boot for the odd occasion when I loose the network connection and Ubuntu can't seem to recognize my Ethernet hardware anymore (rebooting Vista and rebooting Ubuntu fixes it ... go figure :().

I assume that Cross Browser Testing uses a farm of virtualized servers that one can pay to access to using a VNC like protocol. They should install IETester on their Windows box too (shameless plug for JFR).