Windows 7 - and Sun VirtualBox - Free Computing

Want to try the new Windows 7 Release Candidate but are you unwilling to trash your Windows (or Mac) computer to install it? Then Sun's VirtualBox free virtualisation software makes an ideal companion for your adventure.

VirtualBox provides a free virtualisation environment - this means you can run multiple operating systems at the same time on your PC or Mac. You can download it from http://www.virtualbox.org/ for free.

After you have downloaded and VirtualBox, head over to Microsoft to download the Windows 7 release candidate, again for free. This fully working copy of Windows will run until . You can start the download process at: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/. Don't forget to make a careful note of the Product Activation code displayed on the web site after you start the download - you will not be able to use the Windows 7 software without it.

The download from Microsoft is an ISO DVD image, so you will need a DVD burner to create the installation DVD and some software to burn the DVD image to the disk- WindowsXP Explorer did not want to play ball so another free download helped here in the shape of: http://download.cnet.com/Active-ISO-Burner/3000-2646_4-10602452.html?tag=mncol

After installing the Active@ ISO Burner and burning a DVD from the Microsoft downloaded ISO we are ready to go, so I started VirtualBox and selected NEW virtual machine and it started a wizard that quickly and painlessly sett up a new virtual environment. I opted to allow the new virtual machine's harddrive to grow in size as needed.

I then inserted the install DVD when prompted and clicked the virtual machine into full screen mode so I could better follow what was going on.

Windows 7 installer started with a prerry blue splash screen and the install wizard started, and I was a little confused when it detected a previous installation of Windows but I put this down to a foible of the VirtualBox environment and clicked continue and the setup then started to copy the temporary installation files to the harddrive.

As I watched this happen my spider sense started tingling so a thumped atl-tab to see what was going on and saw a VirtualBox window containing a Windows 7 installer sitting at the welcome screen... the Windows 7 installer I had been working with was running in my main WindowsXP environment as was poised to wipe my hard drive - not a good idea when this is happening on my employers laptop! I hit the CANCEL CANCEL CANCEL key, several times and ejected the DVD to force the installation to abort.

Phew, close call.

Once the XP instance of the Windows installer had cleaned up after itself, I carefully switched back to the VirtualBox window containing the Windows 7 installer and continued with the installation. (Another reason why Macs are safer than Windows- I could not have made the same mistake if the host Operating System had been OSX rather than XP)

Once I was installing the Windows 7 software onto the right (virtual) computer, the installation completed smoothly and flawlessly- much smoother than the XP or Vista installers - in fact it was really quite mac-like.

Windows 7 and VirtualBox appear to get on well together and not additional steps were necessary to allow Windows7 out onto my home Wi-Fi network and out onto the Internet. The Wi-Fi connection of the Host XP environment appears to have been used as Windows 7 did not request any Wi-Fi credentials.

The Windows 7 and VirtualBox experience can be further enhanced by installing the VirtualBox drivers into the Windows 7 environment. This provides support for more video modes by installing a new video driver that makes screen resizing and resolution management automatic as you change the size of the window that Windows 7 is displayed in. New keyboard and mouse drives also improve the easy of switching from the host to the virtual environment. The extensions are easy to install, simply by clicking on an icon at the bottom of the VirtualBox desktop window. This causes VirtualBox to mount a virtual DVD to Windows 7 which you can then use to install the drivers.

Clicking around the Windows 7 desktop is fast and response, and a world away from the sluggish responsed of the first generation Virtual PC environments.

Next we needed an office suite, so off to www.openoffice.org to download the latest free version and 10 minutes later wordprocessing is up an running- again all for free. Open Office 3 looks and feels a lot like MS Office 2003 and also feels a lot snappier and more responsive running on Windows 7 than Office 2007 in the XP environment.

Teething Problems
I tried to enable the VirtualBox Shared Folders feature, which would have made a folder on my host XP system look like a network share to the virtual Windows 7 environment - VirtualBox said it was working but Windows7 would not see the share - I need to work on this a bit more, it would be because Windows 7 is in HOME mode rather than OFFICE mode which appears to alter the way it behaves on a network and how it manages shared resources. This was the only thing that I could not get to work.

In Summary

First impressions of Windows 7: it's what Vista should have been - clean, fast and stable
Sun Virtual Box: Easy to use, great value and full featured.