Hi all, so I´ve had a copy of Win 7 beta sitting here waiting to be tried out and recently posted how I should install. The Geek suggested running it in a Virtual Machine, so how do I do that, and what would you all suggest using? (I have never used VM´s before). HD space isn´t a problem so I could move things around to create enough needed. Thx in advance, Matt
EDIT: How much space would be needed to try out games, programs, etc.?
I've used this one a couple of times. Very user friendly. But I'm no expert with it, so don't ask me anything technical.
http://www.virtualbox.org/
See. You're all getting technical already :) . As I said, I only used it twice. And that was to check out some things in 2 other different versions of Vista other than that which I have installed. So, I deleted everything entirely after each test. But I believe it does hold the OS if you want it to. Will check it out in a couple of weeks :)
Oz, if you install Linux in a Virtual Machine session, then GRUB will be installed inside the VM Disk file or whatever storage is allocated to the VM for Linux. It will not put GRUB on your hard drive, overwriting the MBR, as long as you run the installer inside the VM.
EDIT: that's a little confusing. GRUB will be installed on your hard drive but only inside the VM storage space, not on the real (non-virtual) drive.
ScottW, Does that mean that it would not be a good idea to install W7 under VM? If you constantly switch between VM and the host system (Vista in my case), you imply that everything you do in W7 under VM (e.g. downloading addl. programs) would be for the birds and next time you have to start all over again - right? So that would be similar to installing W7 on a USB stick (I have not done that yet but I made this experience with my Fedora on the USB).
whs, you could use a VM to test out Win7 and you would not lose your changes each time. The Virtual Machine (VM) creates a virtual disk drive. Whether this is actually just stored in a file or uses an empty partition only matters to the software managing the VM. The Win7, or other, OS that is installed inside the VM sees the virtual disk drive as a disk drive. It has an MBR, partition tables, and all the rest. When you write data or make changes these are written to, for example, the C: drive as far as Win7 will know. When you shut down -- virtually shut down -- Win7, the VM session closes but all of the data saved to the virtual disk drive is still there. The next time you (virtually) boot Win7, it reads the partition table, finds the C: drive and reads it's data just as it was.
One drawback to running Win7 in a VM is that you won't experience the changes in speed. So, you won't know how fast Win7 will boot, shutdown, or run on your actual hardware only on the virtual hardware.
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