Testing Windows 7 on VirtualBox 2.2.4

At last! I could spare the time to test the evaluation copy of Windows 7 that I downloaded two weeks ago! I still haven't got the chance to burn the image I downloaded to a DVD and test it on real hardware, but when that happens I'll post my results it in here, to let you know if there are any visible differences... I plan to test Windows 7 on an AMD Sempron +3400 (yes I know, but my budget sucks right now!) with 2GB of RAM.

In this post, I'm going to show you what I went through when installing Windows 7 on VirtualBox. The first thing I noticed was that the installation took a long time to complete, if you compare it to an ordinary Windows XP installation on VirtualBox. But considering that the Windows 7 ISO image is around 2.4 GB, and the Windows XP ISO image I use with VirtualBox is 700MB, maybe it's not a VirtualBox problem. I'll have to compare this with the time it takes Windows 7 to install directly in the same machine, without VirtualBox.

After half an hour, Windows 7 finally finished installing on my VirtualBox VM:

 

I opened Internet Explorer 8, and all went well, except I had to install the most recent Flash player version. After that, I went to http://www.playingforchange.com to test Windows 7 video streaming capabilities on VirtualBox. I played my favorite video, Stand By Me, and I noticed a little slowlyness on the video frames. In full-screen mode, it was impossible to see the video. I could hear the sound allright, but no video for me! Maybe I have to assign more than 512MB of RAM to the virtual machine, and 128 MB of video ram. I'll get back to you on this later on...

 

All in all, I think Windows 7 looks great, and VirtualBox is doing a great job, considering the sloppy hardware I have available to test it :)

 

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Internet Explorer 8 on Windows 7

 

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