Virtual machines are a great way to easily try new operating systems without compromising the current configuration of your entire PC. All the changes we make within them will be completely isolated from our system and, when we get tired of them, it’s as easy as deleting their folder from our hard drive to free up space and leave the PC as if this virtual system had never existed. There are many programs to create these machines, but one of the best known and easiest to use is VirtualBox.
VirtualBox is completely free and open source software currently owned by Oracle and developed and maintained by Apache. This program, available for Windows, macOS and Linux, allows us to test any operating system we want on our computer, be it another version of Windows to test configurations or programs without altering the current configuration of our PC, take the first steps in Linux, or install a very old operating system, such as MS-DOS, to run retro programs and games, to give a few examples.
The process of creating a virtual machine with VirtualBox is very simple and fully guided. It is enough to choose the system that we are going to install, the hardware that we want to emulate, and little else. But, before starting the virtual machine for the first time, we are still interested in reviewing, and adjusting, some configurations in order to get the most out of this software. Let’s see what these options are.
Basic configurations of a virtual machine with VirtualBox
Although many of the virtual machine configuration options can be adjusted in the operating system installation wizard, it never hurts to take a look at these settings to be able to fine-tune the desired operation of our virtual system much better:
- Choose the desired RAM memory . As long as we have RAM to spare on our real machine, we can allocate more memory to the virtual machine so that it is able to run smoother and better. In this way, the virtual operating system will be able to go much more loose, and it will give the feeling that it works better. Of course, we must make sure that our host system has memory available for it, or we can run into a blue screen.
- Increase the number of processors . By default, the virtual machine will work with 1 CPU. But, if our computer has multiple cores, we can increase the number of virtual CPUs. Thus the virtual system takes advantage of them as if they were other processors. This way we can get tasks to run faster in this virtualized system, and everything will work, in general, much better.
- Increase video memory . One of the burdens of virtual machines is video memory. Therefore, within the settings we can increase the amount of video memory that we want to use so that it is capable of better moving the system animations. In addition, we can enable 3D acceleration from this same section. This greatly improves graphics performance, and allows us to allocate more video memory to the system.
- Shared folders . If we are thinking of sharing files between our virtual machine and the real system, we must undoubtedly activate this option. We can create a virtual folder that configures a folder on our real system as if it were a network folder. So that we can exchange data between both systems very easily.
