So my issue lies within the web design realm. As much as I hate IE, I want to make sure my site is showing correctly for users who are unfortunate enough to have it.
The problem is, I run OS X, so the last version available to me is 5, which barely even starts on my machine.
Are there any worthwhile plug ins or methods so that I can design for IE without having to locate a PC?
Get Virtualbox and a CD/ISO of Windows and run it. Or use sites such as http://browsershots.org/.
I find Adobe BrowserLab really help full, the disadvantage is that you need a user name and password (but it's free) and has most of the internet explorers.
I use various Parallels instances on the Mac, with different versions of Internet Explorer running inside Windows XP.
Just get yourself Parallels Desktop (or VMware or something similar), install Windows XP and upgrade to SP3 and get all the other Windows updates. However, exclude the Internet Explorer 8 update.
When your VM is up-to-date (except for IE8), then duplicate the VM, once for IE7 and once for IE8. Install the respective IE versions in those VMs.
If you want to test on Windows Vista and Windows 7 as well (you probably should), apply the same tricks, running multiple VMs.
Note that with 2 GB of RAM, you can probably run no more than 2 VMs at a time. The more RAM, the more VMs you can run in parallel.
Sad to say, but the most practical solution may be to buy a cheap computer and install Windows on it just for testing. At one time I was doing development on Windows XP but also had a Windows 95 box, a Windows 98 box, and a Linux box, to test for compatibility. I don't know how rich you are or how much office space you have available, but having a real box of the given platform is the most reliable way to test. Setting up a multi-boot would presumably be just as good when that's do-able.