So the main point seems to be MS has killed modern.ie -site and redirect to this...

dzhiurgis · on March 1, 2016

XP is 1.25GB while W7 is 4GB. That is nothing compared to how useful they are every so often.

stephenr · on March 1, 2016

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.

trm42 · on March 1, 2016

Using one of those newer Retina MBPs which one cannot be upgraded in any way. The only disk expansion for these is the micro sdhc card hack (like this: http://9to5mac.com/2014/05/23/three-hacks-for-adding-permane...).

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

danbee · on March 1, 2016

OWC offer SSD upgrades for the Retina MBP's http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/SSD/OWC/Air-Retina/Apple-MacB...

bluedino · on March 1, 2016

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.

hexsprite · on March 1, 2016

I use a service like browserstack instead for the occasions I need to test on IE

pmontra · on March 1, 2016

Can you use it to test sites on localhost, maybe through a ssh tunnel?

tracker1 · on March 1, 2016

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.

Piskvorrr · on March 1, 2016

Much more convenient, indeed. Hard to take offline though ;)

bluedino · on March 1, 2016

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...