Welcome!

[r_jake]

I work on a Mac but bought a cheap PC purely for testing as it was more cost effective than buying VMware plus a licensed copy of Windows. Still have to use IE Tester to check my work against IE's 6, 7, and 8 though. Tried using IES4OSX using Darwine, but it was buggy and unreliable. If only someone would port IE Tester over to OSX, then life really would be made much easier.

[justin.lancaster]

Cool to hear everyone's techniques to this important process.

I'm leaning toward buying a cheap laptop for testing purposes. My wife's on-board since we'll get a laptop out of the deal... It's always good when I can get her to sign off on a new gadget purchase.

Now the scary part... Which laptop? I don't have a clue when it comes to PCs.

I've been working on macs for 10 years now and haven't a clue who makes a decent PC. The only thing I know is I'm not buying a Dell. Had a customer service nightmare with my wife's old laptop that was constantly messed up.

I saw a few Gateways that look decent for around $400. $500 is my max budget. Anyone have any recommendations?

[Cipher]

Browsershots.org and Virtualbox running on my archlinux system. As for a decent laptop I would look at either Lenovo or HP. I have a Lenovo Thinkpad W500 and a HP nx6325 and they are both really nice machines.

[Kaypearl]

BootCamp on MacBook M62:
Mozilla Firefox 3
Safari 3
IE 7
IE 6 (http://tredosoft.com/Multiple_IE)
Opera 10

If everything is fine on all those, I test them on Leopard:
Mozilla Firefox 3
Safari 3
Opera 10

What's so bad about BootCamp? Other than the fact that I couldn't copy a VMWare Disk to the local disk and I can't use the function keys to turn the volume down, etc, everything's been ok, lol.

As you can see, for browser testing, I only test the major browsers unlike IE 5 for Mac, Netscape, etc. .

[banjo]

If you're on an Intel Mac you can install a version of IE6 called "ies4osx" (http://www.kronenberg.org/ies4osx/) which uses Darwine and the X11 environment. This is what I use to test in IE6, and then I'll use http://www.ipinfo.info/netrenderer/index.php for the other flavours of IE.

[r_jake]

Now the scary part... Which laptop? I don't have a clue when it comes to PCs.

If it's main purpose is just to test pages and maybe do some Office stuff, I'd go for the cheapest model of a known brand. There's no point blowing your profits on something that is only being used now an then. I picked up a Compaq for under £300 (about $400) and it does the job.

[pandora]

I use http://crossbrowsertesting.com
They give you a 5 minute time limit for free users, but 5 minutes is usually all you need to remotely log in to one of their boxes and test your site.

[skunkbad]

You should look at Virtualbox. I use it successfully on Ubuntu, but it can be run on Mac as well. It is FREE, and easy to use.

[justin.lancaster]

Thanks for the other replies.

I found my wife's old Dell Laptop today while cleaning up. A Dell Inspiron 6000 w/ Windows XP running IE6. Wow, I never thought I'd be excited about that! But what could be better for debugging CSS.

Everything is in working order with the computer but the display won't stay on for more than 30 secs at a time. I plugged it in to an external display and it works great. I tried restoring the system software but it didn't fix the display issue. If I close the thing and open it the display works for another 30 seconds or so. Anyone have a clue what this could be?

Anyone know a good online resource to figure out how to fix it myself?

If I can't fix it I'll just buy another display to hook it up to, but It would be nice to have laptop around the house we can use.

[steerpike]

http://www.xenocode.com/browsers/

[tan]

I think you need to test in both OS: Mac and Windows

[peteriliev]

I work on a PC with Vista. IE Tester works fine to test your designs on different IE versions.