In the battle for consistent design there is no more fearsome foe than Microsoft Internet Explorer 6. Despite the browser quickly coming up on its eighth birthday, it is still in wide use – particularly in markets where software piracy is more wide-spread and users aren’t able to upgrade to the “Windows Genuine Advantage”-required IE7 or IE8.

As such, it’s important that you be able to test your design, theme/template, or even your blog tweaks to assure that they work alright in the archaic and anarchistic browser.

One problem – due to kernal code differences, it isn’t possible to install Internet Explorer 6 or lower on a machine running Windows Vista. So where handy bundles like the MultipleIE package worked well on XP – they’re a no go on Vista.

There are some great static checks you can do using Web apps like Browser Shots and IE NetRenderer, but sometimes you need to interact with the design to see where things are, or aren’t, functioning.

Enter IETester. Created by the same developer as the IE DebugBar, the free Web browser offers up the rendering and javascript abilities of IE5.5 to IE8.

Not only are you able to test how your layouts will look in various IE versions, with the use of the browser’s tabs, you can test multiple versions in the same browser window.

What’s more – it works on both XP and Vista (sorry Mac and Linux users). It’s not flawless, and preliminary usage showed a couple hiccups in the page loading – but for an alpha release, and with nothing else to turn to, who’s complaining.

With users slowly overcoming their adversity of pushing away from the Microsoft monopoly, there’s hope that IE6 will die the death it so rightly deserves, but until then apps like IETester are a welcome helping hand.

I like to keep my non-system/program files on a partition, while leaving the standard C drive to hold the bulk of installed programs and system files. This keeps all my media (movies, music, photos, etc.) seperate from the drive that houses my OS – allowing me a quick and easy way of formatting the system drive, and not needing to back up the much bulkier “media” drive.

Windows, by default, works counter to this by setting up the My Documents folder’s location to the C drive. In the past I went around this by denying that the My Documents folder even existed, and just making my own file system.

As many programs use this area as a default storage area for certain data, as well as some games using it for saved game files, this eventually led to a rather messy file structure that had half of my data on the media partition and half of it on the system partition. Sucky to say the least.

But as I said, a new system – new rules. I finally decided to dig a bit and see if I couldn’t change the default location of the My Documents (or “Documents” directory – as it’s called in Vista). The solution was a WHOLE lot simpler than I had assumed, and I felt rather stupid I hadn’t noticed it sooner.

To change the location, simply follow these steps:

1. Click the START button. With the mouse over the My Documents (”Documents” for Vista) folder/icon, right click and select Properties.
2. For XP: On the Target tab (Location for Vista), simply change the Target folder location to whichever location you prefer.
3. To select a location from the standard file/folder selection box, choose “Find Target…”, or if you prefer to move your current My Documents folder to the new location, choose “Move…” and select your new location.
4. To restore the original location, just click “Restore Default”.

That’s it. It’s just that simple. You can get a few more My Documents customizations at Microsoft’s support page.