How to Use Microsoft Ready-Made VM Images for VMware and VBox

Microsoft Officially Offering Ready-Made VirtualBox And VMWare Images

Microsoft Offering ready made pre-installed windows operating system to test Internet Explorer  , virtual machine images are available for windows ,mac and linux virtualization solutions , for cross browser testing , so you can test your site in different operating systems .

IE versions being offered are:

• IE7 on Vista
• IE8 on Windows 7
• IE9 on Windows 7
• IE10 on Windows 8

Offered  VMs that will run on:

• Windows
• OSX
• Linux

The VM software choices are specific to the OS you choose:

• Windows – Hyper-V, Virtual PC, VirtualBox & VMWare Player
• OSX- VirtualBox & VMWare Fusion
• Linux – VirtualBox

Cross-browser testing
simplified

You have to just download and open vbox files with virtualbox or vmx files with vmware and you will get all pre-installed windows operating system , and you are good to go ,
there is pre-installed windows 8 virtual image if you want to test drive windows 8 🙂

How to Install virtual images :

1. Download Virtual Images
2. extract it somehwhere
3. open vmware player or workstation
4. click on file >> open
5. locate  ” somefile”.vmx
6. it will load up virtual image component

How to Change Office 2010 License Key

Issue: You go to activate Microsoft Office 2010 and you receive a message stating, “Your copy of Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2010 cannot be activated because the specified Product Key has already been activated the maximum number of times permitted for your software license as specified in the Microsoft Software License Terms.”

The solution is to change the product key to another product key. I will show you three different methods of changing the License Key

Method 1

Open “regedit”

Navigate the registry to: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\14.0\Registration\ and delete the whole “Registration” key located under the “14.0″ key

Right click “Registration”

Select “Delete”

Press “Yes”

Close Regedit, Restart an Office 2010 application. You should be prompted to reenter your License Key

Method 2

Open to Microsoft Word

Press “File”

Press “Help”

Select “Change Product Key” (this option was not here on my installation, I used Method 1)

Method 3

Click on Start Menu > Control Panel > Programs and Features (or Add/Remove Programs, depending on your operating system).

Click on your product, e.g. Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2010

Click “Change” on the top menu.

Select the option to “Enter a Product Key.”

Press “Continue”

Changing your Product Key

Once you complete one of the Methods listed above you should be able to change your Product Key

Enter the appropriate product key from the top of this page and click “Continue.”

Accept the agreement

Press “Continue”

Configuration will occur

Press “Close”

Select “I want to activate the software over the Internet (recommended)”

Press “Next”

Your product should activate successfully

Press “Close”