IE7-9 testing workflow on a Mac

I'm at my wits end right now trying to get a website working in IE7-9, the issue I'm having is getting text-shadow to appear in a decent matter. I've been using the 960 grid system so changes are very minimum, I've been checking changes with IE Netrender. However lately IE Netrender has been having issues so I can't test the layout in a timely fashion.

I did have VM Ware set up but I'm really tired of reactivating my Windows copy 开发者_Go百科and installing a separate image for each version of the browser. I don't have Windows 7 for IE9 as well. I'm looking for a free option. I've tried searching but everything seems outdated.

So my question is, how does everyone test their site for IE7-9?

The IE Developer Tools let you set IE7 and IE8 modes on IE9, so you can get 98% testing with one version.

There are some issues that don't crop up there though, so its a good idea to do a quick real browser check at the end.

MS has free VMs you can download with the different versions of IE on them. I'm not sure if you can run them on a Mac though.

http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=11575

By having a Windows license. Perhaps not the answer you're looking for, but there's no such thing as a free meal. The only truly guaranteed method of testing a site in Internet Explorer is to actually use it in Internet Explorer, be it in a virtual machine or on a real PC. Spoon used to have an Internet Explorer virtualization web app, but that has since been removed at Microsoft's behest.