James Bannan16 December 2008, 10:00 PM
Need to keep XP running on your Vista system? Virtualization is the key and our step-by-step tutorial will get you there.
Page 2 - Install VirtualBox
Step 2 - Install VirtualBox
Before we start, a quick note about our choice of virtualization platforms. There are other options available for Microsoft Windows, such as Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 SP1 and VMWare Workstation.
While either of these options is more than acceptable, we chose VirtualBox because we wanted to base the tutorial on a platform which was free, intuitive and which supported as wide a range of host and guest operating systems as possible. Virtual PC 2007 SP1 is excellent and freely available but does not support non-Windows systems very well or 24-bit colour depth, while VMWare Workstation is an outstanding platform but is proprietary.
During testing we were very impressed with VirtualBox, and are using it as the platform for all our virtualization tutorials.
To install VirtualBox:
- Launch the installer and click Next
- Accept the license agreement
- in the Custom Setup window, make sure that all the options are selected then select Next
- Click Install
- During the install you will be prompted to approve the installation of virtual device drivers, as they're not signed. Accept the installation
Once installed, launch VirtualBox from the Start Menu. You'll be prompted to register (which is free) and this also creates the default VirtualBox folder structure within your profile (%USERPROFILE%\.VirtualBox).