When I first got my new Intel powered MacBook over a year ago I excitedly downloaded the free trial of Parallels and hoped to usher in a new dawn of working with OS X and Windows simultaneously. When my trial ran out I decided that as flashy as it was, I couldn’t really justify ponying up the dough for such a luxury and that it wouldn’t take too much effort to wean my self off Windows entirely.
Having already scratched my virtualisation itch I wasn’t that interested when our editor-in-chief asked me to do a review of the new release of VirtualBox, but being the consummate professional that I am I downloaded it (a month later) and set my brain to review mode.
My first impressions were very good, considering this is a free open source piece of software I was not expecting it to be as user friendly as it was. In fact, the process of setting up a virtual computer and installing the guest operating system is almost exactly the same as for Parallels. As you’d expect you can customise the specs of your virtual pc and I decided to have 700 MB of RAM, 128 MB of video RAM and I chose the expanding hard drive option which means it only takes up what is uses (as opposed to pre-defining a chunk of say 5GB).
I’ve been reliably informed that Vista would stalk me in my dreams so I decided to install good old XP on my Macbook. Having installed XP I was pretty impressed with the overall speed and stability of the guest os and OS X, there were a few stutters and I couldn’t get sound to work without getting a bit of delay but I’m sure this could be fixed if I looked into it. The major problem was that I couldn’t get the shared folder to work but after as bit of searching on the internet I found out that setting up a shared folder in both systems isn’t enough, you also have to install the guest additions software which is linked to from the VirtualBox menus. Once I’d done this I not only set up the shared folder without any problems but performance actually improved.
Basically VirtualBox does everything you need it to but forgoes the graphical flashiness of something like Parallels. I should also point out that VirtualBox is also compatible with pretty much all versions of Windows and Linux as guest and host operating systems.
