FREE VBOXWIN Virtualisation (Run older Operating Systems without Risk)

I've recently reloaded a PC for my kids and tried a whole bunch of tricks to get my older games working. Most of them worked brilliantly - and I found some amazing Windows extensions for them which I'll blog about later.

Some, didn't work too well under Windows XP. They needed Windows 95/98SE.

While it's possible to dual boot a Windows system so that you choose your operating system on startup, it's messy and there's a much better alternative - you can run the entire operating system in a window.

There's a lot of "virtualisation" software out there, the best known of which is VMWare. Unfortunately, the FREE bottom end of VMWare is the;

ESXi Bare Metal Hypervisor

http://www.vmware.com/products/esxi/

This is a great product for servers but it isn't really suitable for home PCs. In any case, you need to load it FIRST, so it involves an entire Operating System reinstall. The paid VMWare flavours don't.

I was looking for a product which would do, for free, what the paid VMWare products do - and I found the VirtualBOX project.

VirtualBOX

http://www.virtualbox.org/

VirtualBox runs on Windows, Linux, Macintosh and OpenSolaris hosts and supports a large number of guest operating systems including but not limited to Windows (NT 4.0, 2000, XP, Server 2003, Vista, Windows 7), DOS/Windows 3.x, Linux (2.4 and 2.6), Solaris and OpenSolaris, and OpenBSD.

It's pretty impressive.

The one thing missing from the VirtualBOX site is a compiled .EXE file (binary) for Windows. You're expected to download the source code and compile your own. Obviously, it's not something I'm likely to do.

Luckily, there is a pre-compiled version of VirtualBOX available on the internet.

VBOXWin32

http://sourceforge.net/projects/vboxwin32/

VBox Win32 is a 9MB download which installs quite happily on Windows XP and presumably other versions of Windows too. The installation process is very straighforward and I was able to get Windows 98SE running in a window without any confusion. Obviously, you'll need to have the CDs for Windows 98SE (or whatever operating system you want to virtualise).

VBox Win32 is a great way to try out different operating systems, like Linux or to load up old favourites to run older software and games. It's well worth a try.