I’ve been run­ning Microsoft’s Vir­tual PC with their IE6 image for the last cou­ple of days (it’s great — if you take your­self seri­ously as a web con­tent pro­ducer, it’s very much a must-have part of the toolkit) and it pulled some funny busi­ness on me today.

When they announced it a whole bunch of peo­ple were get­ting a lit­tle grumpy about how it didn’t work with Win­dows update — a few of the same were get­ting grumpy about how Microsoft didn’t release a ver­sion for Linux, but no fur­ther com­ment required on them… you’re all of an intel­li­gent enough bunch to realise afore­men­tioned peo­ple fall into the cat­e­gory of … well, you know.

Obvi­ously, it’s no big deal — the whole point of that image it is that it hasn’t (and won’t) update, allow­ing you to keep test­ing on older platforms.

But then, this after­noon, I go and shut down the image (I know, sus­pend­ing is faster, but I was try­ing some­thing dif­fer­ent) and all of a sud­den it goes and says it’s installing 7 updates before it shuts down. In usual XP fashion.

So what gives?

I found myself yelling at it “you’re not even a real oper­at­ing sys­tem! Don’t you get it? You’re going to be used and trashed in a cou­ple of months any­way! Why do you care if you’re virus and spy­ware rid­den by the end of it?” Pos­si­bly a strange response, but there we go.

Got me think­ing about (human) clones, actu­ally. Much mus­ing to be had there. Maybe I’m just strange…

Tags: IE6, Linux, microsoft, operating system, Virtual PC, web content producer, Windows, xp