Just a follow on to what Fabian and others have mentioned and to my own comment.
I ran into problems with Qemu and networking with Win XP as the host. Also, the accelerator layer kqemu needs to be compiled for XP to work right (apparently, not confirming that) and I didn't want to go to the fuss. So, I downloaded VMPlayer (also free) and it has much much better performance over Qemu (about 10x). I've also used VirtualPC in the past to try out Linux with win2k as the host and that seemed ok but networking was a problem there (probably owing more to the linux distro and my lack of skillz).
I found this really useful link if you want to try VMPlayer and not invest in the (not free) VMWorkstation:
Also a reminder, you might not be able to get your host copy of XP to work on a VM as the guest OS also as you wil still need to activate it with M$ - especially for IE7. I didn't try as I didn't want my one "in use" key to get black listed or something less savory like that. IE 7 validation seemed to think my unactivated WinXP guest was not authentic as well.
Last night I settled on upgrading my win XP host to IE7 + FF 2.0 and set up a guest VMplayer for Win 2k SP4 with FF1.5 and IE 6.5 sp1. Later I'll probably make one for earlier browsers as well as some linux clients. A weekend of screwing around with virtual clients and still havn't fixed any CSS bugs for IE 7's sake yet! :-P
Just a follow on to what Fabian and others have mentioned and to my own comment.
I ran into problems with Qemu and networking with Win XP as the host. Also, the accelerator layer kqemu needs to be compiled for XP to work right (apparently, not confirming that) and I didn't want to go to the fuss. So, I downloaded VMPlayer (also free) and it has much much better performance over Qemu (about 10x). I've also used VirtualPC in the past to try out Linux with win2k as the host and that seemed ok but networking was a problem there (probably owing more to the linux distro and my lack of skillz).
I found this really useful link if you want to try VMPlayer and not invest in the (not free) VMWorkstation:
{Link}
Also a reminder, you might not be able to get your host copy of XP to work on a VM as the guest OS also as you wil still need to activate it with M$ - especially for IE7. I didn't try as I didn't want my one "in use" key to get black listed or something less savory like that. IE 7 validation seemed to think my unactivated WinXP guest was not authentic as well.
Last night I settled on upgrading my win XP host to IE7 + FF 2.0 and set up a guest VMplayer for Win 2k SP4 with FF1.5 and IE 6.5 sp1. Later I'll probably make one for earlier browsers as well as some linux clients. A weekend of screwing around with virtual clients and still havn't fixed any CSS bugs for IE 7's sake yet! :-P