Since most of us seemed not to know about it, and since this could be useful to many of us, it's not totally clear to me that "click bait" applies here.
haters gonna hate, some people don't like to see "Microsoft" and "free" in the same sentence, unless it's something bad about the company. Of course MS does this for its own business, and why not, that doesn't make it any click-bait title...
Don't be a twat. Someone posted a link to genuinely useful info that many people wouldn't have been aware of. So it's not linkbait. Look up the definition.
Well, it is "free as in beer", with some strings attached (90-day usage limit, no production use); still very useful for testing (this used to be at modern.ie, apparently moved to a new address).
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.
Depends on the type of key you have. If it is a PRO(i am assuming that's the version of OS)/non-OEM license, then you shouldn't have a problem. Definitely worth a short though.
I don't see why not, as long as the license for that key matches the OS.
A friend of mine used to buy COA stickers from eBay that had XP keys on them for like $10 each. They are OEM keys so he used an OEM XP CD-ROM to install them with the keys on used systems. They would activate even if they have been used before. If activations run out you can call Microsoft and have them reset.
Windows 10 Keys are different, locked to the hardware. Windows XP keys can be transferred to a different system.
XP has some kind of hardware check too. I had to use a key off the internet when I cloned an ancient PC into a VM because it wouldn't accept the original key.
In a word the EULA says you can't transfer a license to a different PC, but it hasn't been tested in a court yet. People have transferred an OEM license and activated it. So it can be done, but the question about it being legal might vary by nation as Germany allows it if other nations do not.
But since it hasn't been tested in a court yet, nobody can say how legally binding it is or is not.
Agreed on not tested and my philosophy with legal grey areas is to avoid being part of the test case... However, these specific images come with their own EULA that says that you can not apply a different license to them (I checked because I would have also liked to have done so if it were allowed).
Just use this as they suggest for testing. Keep your data elsewhere and roll back/re-install every few months.
If these VMs use the same license as the ISOs, then they're under a 90-day evaluation license which disallows commercial usage. Maybe this is what he's referring to?
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...)
I feel your pain. A (pirated) hackintosh VM doesn't cut it, as I need 3D acceleration to test a very complex WebGL app. And it's the slowest browser from the bunch. Safari is the new IE6 for me. I hate it with passion.
From what I gathered you have 2 solutions for GPU passtrough : if you're a Unix guru and have plenty of time to spare you might make it work with Xen or if you have money VMWare looks easier but you may need a license and special hardware (if you have a regular Nvidia graphic card it won't work, you need an ATI or a Nvidia Quadro).
No. You just need to read Alex Williamson blog, for nvidia you need to patch drivers a bit - it is not hard. And compared to the price of macpro with discrete GPU - not that expensive either.
For anyone else, thinking hmm, that sounds easy. The TL;DR is that you don't "just need to read" Alex's blog, you need to read, think, try, fix, bug search, rinse, repeat, take on board a number of complex ideas and concepts, and/or buy ideal hardware. The arch linux topic is very long! I've read most of it as it came in, but reading that whole thing for tidbits and fixes that Google doesn't always turn up isn't quick or easygoing.
Good luck!
Yeah, I'm definitely a geek and tinkerer, but testing in Safari is work stuff I don't like, and the only way to do it properly is with actual Apple hardware.
Not only that, you need an iPhone and several iPad versions too because they are all different. Supporting Apple devices suck unless that is your main dev platform.
Although in all honestly, it's much less of a problem. Only about 6% uses an iOS version before iOS 8 at the moment. (I'm one of 'm!)
Interestingly, by doing this developers have a harder time supporting me (iOS 6 and 7 on phone/tablet). The result is forgoing app updates and even new apps altogether that I can't download. This pushes me to upgrade, and keeps the iOS adoption rate quite high. Facilitating devs in supporting old iOS versions does the opposite. I'm not a fan of this but I can easily imagine the benefits for Apple.
You're right, it only goes back to iOS 8.1, but you do get the devices for all current iPhone, iPad, Apple TV and watchOS.
Of course having a real device is much better, but as a web developer, this helped me pick up a Safari only bug very easily without needing to spend on a real device.
You can use OSX's debugger in Safari to remote debug a web page in the simulator, which I think is pretty neat.
Is that any worse than Android? I certainly wouldn't think so, given that there are way fewer Apple models and they tend to have way better distribution of their software updates.
Aren't there hosting places where you can rent a mac by the hour or by the month? I just googled "rent a mac" and found a couple. No clue how legit or shady any of the sites are though.
Unless Microsoft doesn't allow range requests, any half-decent client will happily resume an interrupted download. This includes browsers and command-line utilities like curl and wget.
Edit: Just tried one of the files with curl. They resume just fine, and the download URLs aren't even tied to a session or IP. I copied the URL from my local browser and used curl on a remote server. No problem. :)
Browsers certainly do resume downloads. Many sites don't honor range requests, though, typically due to passing the file data through some script. And some expire URLs.
Odd, I could've sworn I used curl when I had this issue a while back. Maybe they changed something or I did something terribly wrong. Thanks for testing though.
I know the chances of MSFT distributing these as torrents is basically zero due to their legal department, but it feels like this would be an ideal candidate (from a technical standpoint) for a torrent. Would also mean that if I download it, if our clients are set up correctly, my coworkers can download it faster by loading it from me than the internet.
That would defeat the purpose of them having a large range of images available. These images are made so you can spin them up, test the site with a range of IE/Windows combos, and then spin things down again.
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!
You must not remember some of the more memorable worms like blaster. It was a complete nightmare and would own machines that weren't behind a firewall in minutes. Luckily long since patched, but it's only a matter of time for others.
However, I believe these OS-es come with certain presets that will not expose them to the wild-internet immediately. I assume (yes - assume) that MS has enabled the firewalls per default on these images, so unless you use them to browse to certain "entertainment sites" you should be quite ok...
Edit: ok, ran a lab-test (so not the real thing): Windows XP with IE6 on one VM, Kali with Armitage on the other. A "Hail Mary" of 22 exploits did not result in any session on the windows machine...
The naive scenario is to fire up those VMs in a network completely contained within your development system and test locally. This makes the VMs safe.
However this seldom works because web sites, even the ones running on localhost, have all sort of external dependencies, from webfonts to third part assets stored on CDNs. So VMs need an access to the Internet and that access could compromise them.
Probably restoring them from the original image after each shutdown is the best way to fix this issue.
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. "
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
There are tools for this.. iirc BrowserStack is a service on top of Selenium WebDriver, and there's tooling for it in the node ecosystem. IIRC, there's decent Ruby tooling, but I prefer to do all my browser related things in JS.
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.
I have plenty of disk space but my photography hobby is eating most of it and the first thing that gets thrown away is the 14 Gb vmdk (this time it's Windows 8.1 + IE11).
Next one is probably 8 gigabytes of MS Office 2016. How can Office eat 8 gigabytes? :D (Compared to LibreOffice's 700 Mb or Office 2011 1,3 Gb.
And why worry about the new IEs and Edge? Microsoft says they support standards and so forth ... ;-D
Those are only available for the 2012 and early 2013 Retina machines, the first two models. You can also get an mSATA adapter on eBay and use any mainstream mSATA drive to upgrade those which is even cheaper than the OWC drive.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
149 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 199 ms ] threadI know they offered Virtual PC and VirtualBox previously, is the news that Parallels is now supported?
[1] http://superuser.com/q/109944/23461
Let's face it, this was a click bait (esp the free bit) and we all fell for it.
For me click-bait would mean "Microsoft releases software for free! You will never believe what the 4th iso contains!" or something to that effect
HN is a constitutional democracy. The constitution is https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Please abide by it.
How old is this content…is it new? Was it published a day ago, a month ago, a year ago? I guess we'll never know.
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.
A friend of mine used to buy COA stickers from eBay that had XP keys on them for like $10 each. They are OEM keys so he used an OEM XP CD-ROM to install them with the keys on used systems. They would activate even if they have been used before. If activations run out you can call Microsoft and have them reset.
Windows 10 Keys are different, locked to the hardware. Windows XP keys can be transferred to a different system.
http://www.experts-exchange.com/articles/3721/Can-I-transfer...
In a word the EULA says you can't transfer a license to a different PC, but it hasn't been tested in a court yet. People have transferred an OEM license and activated it. So it can be done, but the question about it being legal might vary by nation as Germany allows it if other nations do not.
But since it hasn't been tested in a court yet, nobody can say how legally binding it is or is not.
Just use this as they suggest for testing. Keep your data elsewhere and roll back/re-install every few months.
In particular, I'd love to install ReactOS and build LibreOffice, er, natively.
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...)
http://vfio.blogspot.bg/
just googling vfio kvm leads you to very thorough arch linux topic (with a bit of drama on the end, whatever)
Of course I assume that people that frequent hacker news are geeks and tinkerers.
Liked Krakow a lot, specially the subterranean bars. :)
http://www.macincloud.com works very well, and they have billing by the hour and versions of OS X ranging from Lion through to El Capitan.
No connection with them, just a satisfied customer.
Also, no simruntime for 7.0 and before works in El Capitan, regardless of Xcode version.
Interestingly, by doing this developers have a harder time supporting me (iOS 6 and 7 on phone/tablet). The result is forgoing app updates and even new apps altogether that I can't download. This pushes me to upgrade, and keeps the iOS adoption rate quite high. Facilitating devs in supporting old iOS versions does the opposite. I'm not a fan of this but I can easily imagine the benefits for Apple.
Of course having a real device is much better, but as a web developer, this helped me pick up a Safari only bug very easily without needing to spend on a real device.
You can use OSX's debugger in Safari to remote debug a web page in the simulator, which I think is pretty neat.
Edit: Just tried one of the files with curl. They resume just fine, and the download URLs aren't even tied to a session or IP. I copied the URL from my local browser and used curl on a remote server. No problem. :)
I guess a torrent might be tricky if they want to keep a "no redistribution" licensing clause.
This specific site does support Range requests, therefore resuming - and most browsers can resume these days as well.
Check out http://burnbit.com/
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.
And things like Windows 7+IE8 will show different bugs from Windows XP+IE8
What can I use them for, for how long, and what limitations are in place?
I don't believe that the images that Microsoft made available are so vulnerable as-they-are that they will be infected within hours...
However, I believe these OS-es come with certain presets that will not expose them to the wild-internet immediately. I assume (yes - assume) that MS has enabled the firewalls per default on these images, so unless you use them to browse to certain "entertainment sites" you should be quite ok...
Edit: ok, ran a lab-test (so not the real thing): Windows XP with IE6 on one VM, Kali with Armitage on the other. A "Hail Mary" of 22 exploits did not result in any session on the windows machine...
However this seldom works because web sites, even the ones running on localhost, have all sort of external dependencies, from webfonts to third part assets stored on CDNs. So VMs need an access to the Internet and that access could compromise them.
Probably restoring them from the original image after each shutdown is the best way to fix this issue.
From: https://modernievirt.blob.core.windows.net/vhd/release_notes...
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.
On your model you can even opt for bigger main SSD and probably replace dvd with another SSD like this: https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Installing+MacBook+Pro+17-Inch+... . Oh the sweet upgradeability! <3
I have plenty of disk space but my photography hobby is eating most of it and the first thing that gets thrown away is the 14 Gb vmdk (this time it's Windows 8.1 + IE11).
Next one is probably 8 gigabytes of MS Office 2016. How can Office eat 8 gigabytes? :D (Compared to LibreOffice's 700 Mb or Office 2011 1,3 Gb.
And why worry about the new IEs and Edge? Microsoft says they support standards and so forth ... ;-D
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...
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.