discovering how a site looks in ie9

How can I find out how my site looks in ie9. Is there a way to install ie9 on my windows XP desktop or a standalone clone of it?

www.browsershots.org
A great site for this sort of thing. Of course if you need more than one screen capture per day you may want to look into a more permanent solution.
As far as I know, you can't have a newer version of IE installed. You can possibly re-install an older version (or some sort of testing version for compatibility) but once you install 9 the others will be replaced, unless you reinstall them that way.

I don't think you can install anything on XP that lets you see what it would look like in IE 9. I could be wrong though. If there is, you can find it via Google. You cannot - as far as I know install IE 9 on XP, so that's out. And I'm not aware of any emulator other than something third party like what Daniel mentions. There are similar but more extensive for hire services that let you view your page real time on a virtual machine running the browser(s) and OS you want to test in. Generally several OS's are available.

Things are different if you run Windows 7 professional or greater (I think that's any version of Windows 7 other than one with 'Home' in its name). I have IE 9 on it, so I can see first hand what that looks like. It can emulate IE 8 and 7. It's not perfect, but it does a good to very good job of it. For fine points I have a virtual machine running XP where I have IE 8 installed along with TredoSoft's standalone versions of IE 5.5, 6, and 7. The IE 8 is perfect because it's a real IE 8. The standalones are again good to very good. Throw in IE Tester on the main machine and I can pretty much tell for sure what's going to work in legacy IE and what's not.

I completely missed that you said XP. I'm not sure what you can do then except using an external service. Virtual computers are always an option but they are usually very slow, especially for a more advanced browser. But if you're just looking at a website it might be ok.

Ah, emulator was the word I was looking for. I wasn't sure if there was a way to install this or not on windows XP, thanks for the answers. Browsershots may be what I need. I have not tried it yet, but it is good to know about that one.

Off topic: my favorite thing about browsershots is seeing what my sites look like in text-only browsers. Maybe it's too many hours spent in front of the screen designing them, but I find that to be very amusing. And I also like some of the odd browsers that always seem to render pages incorrectly (or perhaps, for all I know, they're actually conforming to standards).

Thanks for that link, Daniel. I've been using Adobe Browser Lab to accomplish the same thing. Well... until now. :)

You could always just install one of those, like the Lynx:

http://www.lynxbrowser.com/