Emulators for older browsers

I'm wondering what the best policy is regarding testing on older browsers.

I have ff2 and ie7 running on my desktop and ie6 on the laptop. Is this enough? I would be really interested to hear what others do and how they overcome not being able to run more than one version. I do understand there are ways around that, mind you, given my poor experience with vista I would feel reluctant doing anything that could have issues for the operation of my pc.

Are there any good emulators for older browsers that I could point to a page to see how it would render?. I'm most concerned about ie5, I've just done a basic site for friends but it gives me a cold sweat to think how it might look in ie5, maybe that's why I haven't heard back from them, I wouldn't want ie5 to come between a good friendship.

Any help greatly appreciated.

Paul R

This is quite useful
http://tredosoft.com/Multiple_IE
Really you need to test it on as many as possible. Personly I only test on Firefox, explorer 6 and 7 and Safari

I use the above Multiple IE and I also will go here for a screenshot in Safari
http://www.browsrcamp.com/

Thanks for that Voodoochilli. It says that it's not available for vista yet but I will certainly try to get it onto the laptop.

Thanks for the safari link Lchad, i hear you can now get safari on windows but I don't know if that would give a 100% accurate representation of how a page would render on a mac?.

Paul R

Yes we have had a big discussion about Safari for windows here. Read the thread before you download it.