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”

How to install Windows 7 from a USB - part 1

So after reading our review of Windows 7, you’re ready to take the plunge and upgrade to Microsoft's new OS. You’ve read our upgrade guide, decided whether you want 32- or 64-bit Windows 7, and bought your retail box. But what if you want to install Windows 7 on a netbook or other computer without an optical drive?

Fortunately, you’re not out of luck, because Windows 7 (and Vista, for that matter) can be installed from a USB storage key. Not only does installing from a USB key remove the need for a DVD drive, the install time is also greatly reduced – we shaved off minutes from the total install time. Our step-by-step guide will have you rocking the new version of Windows in no time!

Note: This guide will only work within Windows Vista or 7.

Time = 1 hour

What you need:

• 4GB USB key
  $10, www.newegg.com
• WinRAR
  Free Evaluation Copy, www.rarlab.com
• Windows 7
  $99 (OEM)

1.    Format Your USB Key

Plug in your USB key and back up any existing data stored on it. You’ll need to format the key before you can make it a bootable device.

Open up a Command Prompt as an Administrator. You can do this by finding the cmd.exe in yoru Windows/System32 folder, right-clicking the executable, and selecting “Run as Administrator”. Alternatively, type CMD in the Start Menu search field and activate the Command Prompt using Ctrl + Shift + Enter.

You should be under c:\Windows\system32 (assuming your Windows partition is the C drive). Type “diskpart” in the command line to enter the Disk Partition command line tool, which lets you format and create partitions on active disks.

Type “list disk” to reveal a list of all your active disks, each of which is associated with a number. Make a note of which one is your USB key, based on the capacity. In our screenshot below, our USB drive is Disk 6 (8GB).

Next, type the following commands, one at a time:
Select Disk # (Where # is the number of your USB disk. We typed “Select Disk 6”)
Clean (removes any existing partitions from the USB disk, including any hidden sectors)
Create Partition Primary (Creates a new primary partition with default parameters)
Select Partition 1 (Focus on the newly created partition)
Active (Sets the in-focus partition to active, informing the disk firmware that this is a valid system partition)
Format FS=NTFS (Formats the partition with the NTFS file system. This may take several minutes to complete, depending on the size of your USB key.)
Assign (Gives the USB drive a Windows volume and next available drive letter, which you should write down. In our case, drive “L” was assigned.)
Exit (Quits the DiskPart tool)