An IT Department at your fingertips : Amazon's EC2

Amazon Web Services is an essential tool for a versatile software consultant. It gives us a vast array of possible configurations. This comes in handy when working out new ideas. But it's also great for installing and testing legacy code.

EC2 - Virtual Servers in the Cloud

The EC2 tab lets us create virtual machines of many flavors. You can test out AWS for a year using the free usage tier.

Don't have a copy of windows handy? Spin up an EC2 instance with Windows, then connect using remote desktop software.  You can also use a Linux box any time you desire.

There's much that can be done with these instances, even install X-Windows on a linux instance and connect from a Chromebook using Chrome Remote Desktop.