Many of us have heard so many good things about then newest version of Windows that is going to hit the market in later 2009.
A few days ago Microsoft released the Release Candidate ( RC ) of Windows 7 to public with a free licence working for 1 year so that everyone can test it and realize how much it is better than Vista.
Testing a new OS without having a spare PC is not easy because you cannot risk to mess up with your main OS partition and risk to loose all your stuff, that’s why we are going to use a virtual way to install and test it.
There are many PC/MAC virtualization suites out there and most of them are not for free, but we want to test a free x86 virtualization product called VirtualBox by SUN.
VirtualBox can be downloaded here and is available in different versions to be run on Windows, OSX, Linux, Solaris/OpenSolaris, this means that this test of Windows 7 can be run both on a PC or on a Mac or even on a Linux host.
We are going to run this test on a PC running Vista Home Premium.
After installing VirtualBox, you will be prompted with the welcome screen:
Now it’s time to create a new virtual machine were we will install windows 7 and to do that we have to click on the “New” icon to start the “New Virtual Machine” wizard.
Going to the next page we can enter a virtual machine name and choose the OS we are going to install and its version and at this point we realize that VirtualBox has already support included for Windows 7.
Next wizard page is dedicated to virtual machine base memory size and we will set it to 1024 MB.
Now it’s time to setup a Virtual Hard Disk as a Boot Hard Disk (Primary Master) and we also choose to create it from scratch.
Having selected to create the virtual hard disk from scratch a new wizard will be started to prepare the brand new hard disk virtual image.
The first step is to choose between a Dynamically Expanding image or a Fixed-size one, the first will grow as you write data to the virtual hard disk while the second one will allocate immediately all the required space on you hard disk resulting in a faster virtual device.
We can choose the Dynamic allocation that is a bit slower at run-time but is faster to setup, if you want to wait a bit more for real space allocation can go for Fixed-size one.
In the next page you can choose when to store the virtual hard disk image on your real hard disk and the virtual image size that we will set at 40GB.
Now you can hit Finish to end virtual disk setup.
And we can also hit Finish to end the virtual machine setup.
Now our virtual machine is ready to be started as we can see from the VirtualBox main screen.
Before going on we need to get our free evaluation copy of Windows 7 RC and to do that we need to download it from here choosing the 32bit version since VirtualBox cannot virtualize 64bits OS by now. You will also get your RC Product Key, copy it somewhere since you will need it later.
After Windows 7 ISO download has finished you can mount the iso as a virtual DVD for your virtual machine, to do that in VirtualBox select the previously created virtual machine and click on the “Settings” icon to open the Settings window and choose the CD/DVD-ROM section.
Now select to Mount CD/DVD Drive from an ISO Image File and browse to the windows 7 iso.
We can now Start our virtual machine and after a few minutes you will be prompted with Windows 7 install screen absolutely identical to the one seen in Vista.
By default you can switch keyboard and mouse control from your OS to virtualbox one by pressing RIGHT-CTRL key.
Now you can just go on like the usual Windows install.
You will choose a custom full install and you will be prompted to select the hard drive where to install windows 7 and you will see the 40GB virtual hard disk we prepared before that now needs to be formatted.
Windows 7 install process will then start.
After a restart you will see the loading screen of Windows 7 appear.
Installation process will then be completed and a new restart will be needed.
A wizard will appear to enter the final details and the Product Key
Our virtual Windows 7 is now installed and ready to be used and tested.
The Author : WPstudios
WPstudios is a graphic and coding agency specialized in web design, print design, logo and branding, wordpress customization, PHP and Javascript coding, 3D graphic.
June 3rd, 2009 on 02:46
I wish I wasn’t so scared to try this myself haha. But it does look like a nice explanation you’ve done here. Bookmarked for when I get the courage to try it out. Hope Win7 lives up to our expectations; though as someone who uses her PC just for PS, illustrator, and the internet, I haven’t had any problems with Vista. I’m actually not sure why it got such a bad wrap.
July 6th, 2009 on 21:35
Hi, Ok I did all this and – firstly struggled to see the PC on the network – but I managed to figure that out.
Secondly one which I have not figured out is why I suddenly can’t print to the HP printer anymore (from my Mac) – and from the VirtualBox win7 – if you know how I can solve this problem I would very grateful. Thanks.
August 15th, 2009 on 07:07
Do you know if this will run on Windows XP? I get an error that basically says it could mess up my computer.
August 15th, 2009 on 14:25
I did this test on Windows Vista but I installed VirtualBox also on Windows XP x64 and is running fine
August 15th, 2009 on 19:50
Thanks! I will try it out on XP then. Got it running on Vista, but I am trying to figure out how to install my graphics card’s drivers. So I’m onto phase 2…
September 30th, 2009 on 17:22
VirtualBox rocks!
I’m a little confused by people being afraid to try a new OS inside a virtual machine. VirtualBox is – by far – the easiest of the virtual machine solutions out there. If something goes wrong, delete the VM and either try again or completely forget about it. The big drawback to VMs is they require the same amount of RAM that a complete machine would to perform well. So, if you host on WinXP-32bit and only have 2GB of physical RAM, then you can’t really run multiple virtual machines that need more than 1.2GB of RAM to run well. For desktops, RAM is cheap, but you’ll want a 64-bit hosting OS. For laptops, getting above 4GB gets expensive – $280 for me to get to 8GB. Ouch.
I run VirtualBox, Xen, VMware, and soon, KVM virtualization solutions. I’ve tried 3 others that weren’t ready for use. For home users, VirtualBox is the easiest that actually works.
Anyway, I’ve put a link to my blog specific to virtualbox. Enjoy.