Windows XP is old, and Microsoft no longer provides official support for the venerable operating system.
I have used a number of virtual machine software - from costly proprietary to free open source and I have to say that VirtualBox is one of the best.Want a free copy of Windows XP? It's possible using a virtual machine. I hope your experience with VirtualBox is as good as mine. When all of your machines are closed you can then exit VirtualBox from the File menu of the main window. Imagine starting up Windows XP in less than 5 seconds! That is what you will experience when starting a virtual machine from a saved state. Now when you start that Virtual Machine back up it will start up in the same state it was when you closed it. If you haven't saved the machine recently go ahead and select save machine state. When you click Close you will see another window asking if you want to just close the machine or if you want to save the machine state before you close it. When you pause the VM the screen will turn gray (see Figure 4) and you can then close that machine. Instead of going through the standard process of shutting down Windows XP the easiest method of shutdown is to first Pause the virtual machine and then Close the virtual machine. Take a snapshot of the current state of your virtual machine.If you are working within your VM, and you want to get to that menu, click the right Ctrl key and your cursor is released.įrom the Machine menu you can do a number of things such as: Of course you can not get to it if the virtual machine has captured your cursor. One of those menus you will use quite often is the Machine menu. Within that window is a menu with three choices.
You will notice XP is inside of a window.
When you are finished you will have a working install of Windows XP (as shown in Figure 3). This will generally take about the same amount of time a normal installation will take. What happens now is pretty much a standard installation of Windows. Click through that warning and you're ready to rock. To release the cursor you hit the Ctrl key on the right side of your keyboard. To capture the cursor in VirtualBox you just click the mouse inside of the machine window. This is important to know, otherwise you will find yourself not being able to use your mouse outside of VirtualBox.
The first thing you will see is an information box instructing you how to capture and rekease your cursor. Now put your OS cd into the CD drive, select the virtual machine you want to use, and click the Start button. Once you have finished that section, you are ready to finalize your virtual machine and begin installation. This next screen was explained in detail in the original article - refer back to that for details. If, however, you plan on running particular applications that are memory intensive, you should bump up the virtual memory a bit.
This is fine if you don't plan on doing much with the VM. By default VirtualBox will offer you the minimum required to run the virtual machine. You have to still have enough memory left for your host operating system to run. The next screen requires you to select the amount of memory you want to dedicate to your Virtual Machine. You can have as many instances of a single OS as you want so long as you have the room for it. And even though the currently installed VM is Windows XP, we can still install another XP instance. The only difference being that in my example there is already a virtual machine installed. Outside of that - everything should work exactly as expected.īefore you actually read this article make sure you have read through the first article and have VirtualBox installed.Once installed you can fire up VirtualBox and you will see a window similar to that in Figure 1. Now I am using the open source version of VirtualBox so no USB support is included. Believe it or not, Windows XP will work right out of the box.
In fact, as you will witness in the sample installation we will do, no hardware drivers are necessary. You will be surprised at not only how simple the installation is, but how much better hardware detection is. In this article I am going to show you how to actually install an operating system with this tool.
In my last article ( Installing and configuring VirtualBox for virtual OSes)Â I walked you through the installation of the VirtualBox virtual machine tool.