I have a development server in the house that still runs Windows 2000 Server and has Internet Explorer 6.0.2800 on it. The machine is finally starting to show its age and could not hold up to testing my current project, a web application whose end users will primarily use Internet Explorer 6.0.2900. My server just wasn’t cutting it tonight so I bit the bullet and pulled a laptop which had Ubuntu installed. I pulled out my free copy of Windows XP I got from Microsoft for participating in the Windows XP beta program. After installing it, the network card wouldn’t work so updates were impossible. Fortunately, I used to be a Microsoft Partner and participated in the Microsoft Action Pack program so I had a disc that had XP Service Pack 2 on it. After installing that things were looking better but the NIC still wasn’t working. I dug out a USB drive and used another computer to get the network adapter driver from Dell’s website and suddenly the machine was working. After installing the updated video drivers the laptop with 256MB of ram is running almost better than my workstation I used for development! Best of all, it now has Internet Explorer 6.0.2900 and I can see the website exactly as my clients see it!
