"From 12th February Microsoft will start an automatic transition from IE6 to IE7. Administrator’s from different companies which still uses Windows Server 2003 or XP, now gets a possibility to avoid this automatic installation of IE7. Microsoft has just released a tool which can be used to deactivate the automatic installation of IE7. The tool will however only work if you are using Windows XP SP2 or Windows Server SP1 2003. You can download them from Microsoft here."

For those of us who make CSS (no tables) skins, this is welcome news. Surely within weeks of these automatic updates the percentage of IE6 users will drop from about 26% to under 10% and we can stop spending as much time making a skin work well in IE6 as we do on all the rest of the skin design and implementation.

However, if you are still going to test using IE6, I recommend that you make sure that your system doesn't get automaticly updated to IE7. I plan on keeping my wife's computer running IE6 until Google Analytics shows me that the percentage of IE6 users has dropped to a level I can live with.

/DaveS  

Virtual PCs are good for this, install windows XP and disable updates, then test your skins in IE6 etc. while still running IE7 etc. on your main operating system.

I suspect that this is what I'll end up doing. But it is a lot of work for so little gain. That was why I just kept my wife's system with IE6.  She doesn't do well with changes to her computer anyway ;=}

/Dave

Virtual PC's are a great tool for developers, we have implemented VPC to our entire software engineering department and has reduce the IT overhead, no moredealing with software engineer testing on the own work stations and crashing them. I have since adapted using this for my web development and eliminated all the extra PC's I once had running. Yes it takes time to set up but once done it is a true time savor in the long term.