Websites that potentially require IE

[Tonsko]

Hi all,

The wife's HP laptop is on it's way out. I've just purchased a new MBP, and figured that I'd give her my old one.

However, the main site that she gets shft work through only seems to work on IE. Beyond that, I think the mac would be great for her.

I've tried: Safari in dev mode and changing the user agent
Firefox
Chrome
Opera

All with no luck. Have also emailed the support of the site in question to see if they can offer any help (in short: no! )

When we were on holiday, she used my machine with a W7 VM on it, which of course worked fine. This is not ideal though. Would mean buying another Fusion licence and another copy of W7

Does anyone here have any ideas?

 

[AdeFowler]

Crossover would be a cheap solution:

http://www.codeweavers.com/products/#cxmac

 

[maflynn]

You can try Virtual Box, which is free though you will need a win7 license.
For open source you can try WineHQ and avoid the win7 license.

 

[Tonsko]

Cheers both. Looks like Crossover doesn't really support IE, and Wine is an open source version of that.

You made me think actually - I had a ferret around in my software drawer and I found an old copy of W7 32 bit that I used to use on my gaming machine - so I think the Virtual Box route is best. A secondary bonus is that I won't have to buy her a copy of office for Mac, as I can use her current copy of office. Everyone's a winner. Except her, as it will be more complicated . But hey, she's getting a free MBP!

Hope that VB has some sort of 'Unity' feature. Will find out.

Thanks again

 

[Satori]

Hope that VB has some sort of 'Unity' feature. Will find out.

It doesn't. It's still a very good (and free) VM solution.

 

[Tonsko]

Heh. First problem: VB says that my win 7 DVD isn't bootable. I was sure it was, and have just tested it on my work machine.

Let the investigation commence!

 

[Chrisbbarnes]

Win 7 problem install

Heh. First problem: VB says that my win 7 DVD isn't bootable. I was sure it was, and have just tested it on my work machine.

Let the investigation commence!

I too had a similar problem when I tried to install Win 7 on boot camp. I had to clone the win 7 disc before my mac /bootcamp could read the disc. Something about not being able to read the drive/disc. I found a solution, but I cant tell you at the moment as I downloaded a disc coppier and installed on on old win xp machine that we now use for our kids. (currently only set up at weekends). Will look then to get instructions on how to clone disc so mac/boot camp and read the disc, then you will be able to install it.

 

[Tonsko]

Thanks. I've surmised that I might have to create an ISO file from the Win7 disk - will try that next. (In order to do this w/disk utility, I choose the 'Master' option - is that correct?)

...right after I've updated OSX. It's a fresh install, and it suddenly occurred to me that this might be another potential issue.

 

[Tonsko]

Ok, well this is perverse. I updated OSX, and deleted everything to do with the Win7 VM and started again.

The only things that I did differently when I created the VM is let it have a 'dynamically sized' disk, as opposed to the 80Gb disk that I did previously, and 2048 Gb of RAM as opposed to 3072.

This time it's worked perfectly!

...so far anyway.

 

[Tonsko]

So here's the solution:

Virtual box, plus a W7 install. They have this 'seamless' mode, that while not as good as Fusion's unity, does at least remove the Win desktop - you still have the task bar, but it's a little more friendly than 'full' Win.

Folder sharing seems to work across the OS' fine.

One little, unrelated niggle, is that the website in question that caused all of this, is programmed for IE only. However, it doesn't work seem to even work properly in IE10! Those devs need to have words with themselves. [/rant]