Internet Explorer is a web browser based on the Trident render engine, which does not follow the W3C Web Standards. Internet Explorer Collection contains multiple standalone versions of IE, which can be used at the same time.

http://www.softpedia.com/get/Internet/Browsers/Internet-Explorer-Collection.shtml

– your solution still has the same extra hardware costs as using any other virtual machine solution (needing more memory for example)

– other virtual machine host software (players) are also free just like VirtualPC (VMware Player and others)

– other virtual machine players can easily load the VirtualPC images and run them effectively (but there may be licensing issues with the images you download from Microsoft, they may only legally let you use them in VirtualPC, check the EULA)

– other players may give better performance than VirtualPC (my experience is the VMWare performs better but others may as well)

I suppose in ending I just wanted to raise that the only difference in costs between the proposed VirtualPC and other free virtual machine players is whether or not you can use the freely provided images from Microsoft based on the EULA.

My personal preference is to build and manage my own virtual machine images as the costs in licensing really aren’t that significant to most testing efforts. I prefer the flexibility of being able to build a VM that matches “generic users” or multiple “corporate SOE” versions or just wierd version mixes that MS may not provide in their downloadable images (eg up to date XP with ‘most’ service packs but with IE6 not IE7 or IE7 but without MediaPlayer11 to test a video streaming site).