What is a good (free) VM solution for windows 7

The obvious candidates are Virtualbox and Virtual PC.

But I have not been paying attention to VM's the last year, have I missed a good alternative?

Nifle

Posted 2010-02-06T00:16:31.400

Reputation: 31 337

What lacking for you from the VM stuff built into Win 7? – Ƭᴇcʜιᴇ007 – 2010-02-06T19:55:42.600

Answers

VMWare player is also free to use, and can create virtual machines as well.

Ben Pilbrow

Posted 2010-02-06T00:16:31.400

Reputation: 283

2Wow, I did not even realize VMWare Player could create VM's now. Kinda makes Workstation 7 a hard sell, eh? – hyperslug – 2010-02-06T01:53:37.070

Yes, I tried it out when I had audio issues with VBox, and it works slick. Every bit as easy as VBox. – DCookie – 2010-02-06T13:52:51.450

2Just note, VMWare player is licensed for non-commercial use only. – PaulWaldman – 2010-03-09T18:24:11.960

What's wrong with VirtualBox? That's still the best free one I've ever used.

Sasha Chedygov

Posted 2010-02-06T00:16:31.400

Reputation: 6 616

I've had audio problems with VBox running an XP guest. – DCookie – 2010-02-06T13:50:52.780

I agree. I find VirtualBox has the best feature set of any of the VM solutions out there and its free.

I have yet to see another VM app support the seamless mode feature of VirtualBox which IMO is the one of the coolest VM features out there.

Chris McGrath

Posted 2010-02-06T00:16:31.400

Reputation: 308

Do you mean the only free VM solution that supports seamless mode? Both Parallels and VMWare support this (but are not free). Also, Parallels, at least, does a better job of it than VirtualBox. – donut – 2010-02-06T13:23:55.817

VMWare Player is free and does support seamless mode. – DCookie – 2010-02-06T13:51:35.603

@DCookie: Doesn't seamless mode require installing VMware Tools? And doesn't installing VMware Tools require something other than VMware Player? – bk1e – 2010-02-06T17:15:31.527

This link: http://www.vmware.com/support/player30/doc/releasenotes_player3.html seems to indicate that it does have this feature. I'm pretty sure that VMWare asked me if I wanted Tools installed when I built the VM XP guest.

– DCookie – 2010-02-06T18:37:44.430

That said, the reviews I've seen comparing the two seem to favor VBox. I just can't make it work with the audio on my W7 host. – DCookie – 2010-02-06T18:38:37.863

virtualbox has its own tool set which comes with vbox but yes you do need to install the tools in the guest OS in order to activate fullscreen and seamless modes you may need it for the sound drivers as well but im not 100% sure on that im currently running vbox in windows 7 and have no problems with sounds but cant remember if i had sound before installing the tools i want to say it didnt but im not 100% sure – Chris McGrath – 2010-02-08T05:57:15.170

Actually, both VMWare and Parallels support a seamless mode but VirtualBox doesn't. That is, VirtualBox technically does, but it does not hide the taskbar which will happily float on the screen over or under the host OS' taskbar or just above the Dock on Mac OS. – Andrew J. Brehm – 2012-02-07T12:15:13.200

I install custom laptops for our users, many who need access to dual OS'. Since we started using a minimum of 4GB on laptops I've recommended virtualbox whether the host is windows or linux, the guest OS always being the opposite.

I use this myself, and all users I've set this up for have been very happy with the results, which are much better than dual-booting, although with lower performance, which is very seldom necessary anyways.

Gomibushi

Posted 2010-02-06T00:16:31.400

Reputation: 201