By reading the list of the virtual machines in VirtualBox Manager, VBoxLaunch creates links to each available virtual machine in the jumplist. In addition, the jumplist can also be accessed from the Taskbar if a shortcut is created there.

Use the following link to download VBoxLaunch.

The .zip file will need to be extracted. Copy the application and paste the VBoxLaunch.exe in the location C:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox. Paste the .exe file to the directory.

Right-click this shortcut and choose Create Shortcut. The shortcut can be placed in any location and it will serve its purpose. It is possible that you may not have the permissions necessary create files in the VirtualBox directory. In this case, you will only have the option to create the shortcut on the Desktop. Click Yes for this option. It is easiest to create the shortcut on the Desktop rather than a file location to which you will have to navigate. Once you have created the shortcut, right-click the shortcut and Pin to Start Menu. If you would rather access your virtual machines from the taskbar, it is just as easy. Right-click the shortcut and Pin to Taskbar. It will work the same either way.

To create the jumplist links, start VBoxLaunch from the Start menu or Taskbar once. This will open the VirtualBox Manager, displaying the virtual machines. Next, close the VirtualBox Manager and the jumplist will be set.
Navigate to the Start menu and click the VBoxLaunch shortcut and the jumplist with your virtual machines will open under “Recent Virtual Machines”.

Click on the virtual machine that you want to open and VirtualBox will start the machine. In this demonstration, Windows 8 Developer was selected and it opened immediately without having to use the VirtualBox Manager.

You basically get to skip a step and make the virtual machine access more of a Windows 7 experience.
You will notice that there is a “Manage virtual machines” item under Tasks in the jumplist. By clicking this, you can open the VirtualBox Manager and remove any existing shortcuts to the Virtual Box Manger, if desired.

Though it is a simple tool, it is a convenient tool and useful to users who want to have virtual machine shortcuts in the start menu. You will still need to open VirtualBox directly to make alterations to settings.

This will require Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5, which is extant on Windows 7. If it is not already installed, it can be downloaded from the Microsoft website.

Recently, however, I have adopted a new way of working with all of the various operating systems I have to deal with. Virtual Machines. By using virtual machines I have the best of all possible worlds at my fingertips. Let’s take a peek at exactly how I am doing this and why.

VirtualBox

You will remember a while back I covered VirtualBox. If you missed those articles, here they are:

• Installing and configuring VirtualBox for virtual OSes.
• Installing Windows XP as a virtual machine in VirtualBox.
• Install Guest Additions for a better VirtualBox experience.

Once you have read through the above articles you will be familiar enough with VirtualBox that you will understand the concepts of this article better.

Why I chose Virtual Machines over standard methods

As I stated earlier, I am constantly having to install, re-install, uninstall, etc various operating systems. Sometimes it’s nice to be able to keep an installation for testing as I install another operating system. This is all fine and good and dual booting certainly has its pros and cons. But ultimately being able to save a machine state and close the OS has advantages that dual booting simply can not touch. Here are some obvious reason to use virtual machines over standard methods:

Cost: Instead of having to burn through CDs/DVDs you can download ISO images directly to your drive and install a virtual machine from there. You will also require less hard disk space since the Virtual Machine will use dynamic-sized virtual drives.

Time: No more rebooting into a different OS. Save your OS state and shut it down. The next time you need that OS start the VM and it will return in the exact same state it was in when you saved it.

Efficiency: While you’re installing a new virtual machine you can continue working on the same PC. The installation of the VM happens within its own window allowing you to go about your business.

Testing: I often test a lot of software and sometimes in the testing I can fubar an perfectly good installation. Saving states allows you to go back to a previously saved state prior to the fubar’ing.

Stability: I use a laptop for my Windows work. That laptop has Vista Home Premium installed. Yeah. Needless to say I am constantly having to baby that OS to keep it running right. Prior to using Virtual Machines I would have to reboot from Linux to Windows and hope that the Vista install was still working properly. Now, thanks to Virtual Machines, I just fire up the VM from the last working saved state and all is well. I am still working within a much more familiar (and stable IMHO) host operating system – Ubuntu.

Space saving: Prior to employing virtual machines my office was littered with PCs. Now it’s free and clear (and the office is much cooler without all of those PCs taking up space), because all of my “machines” are housed in one simple environment.

Drawbacks

There is but one real drawback to this setup. You have to have a machine powerful enough to dedicate the resources to the virtual machines. My laptop has 3 gigs of RAM. When running Vista on its own you would think it was a machine from a decade ago. Using VMs I can run a host OS and a couple of guests without seeing much of a decline is performance. Now I will suggest not using KDE 4 as your guest desktop. Stick with either GNOME or a lighter weight desktop so to save resources for more important work.

Final thoughts

I hope this article has helped you understand why virtual machines are the way to go when you need multiple OSes for multiple reasons. I have not had a single problem since employing VMs for all of my testing purposes. I hope you find yourself having the same experience. Have you employed Virtual Machines for your work? If so, tell us why.

Now I am using the open source version of VirtualBox so no USB support is included. Outside of that – everything should work exactly as expected.

Figure 1

Before you actually read this article make sure you have read through the first article and have VirtualBox installed.Once installed you can fire up VirtualBox and you will see a window similar to that in Figure 1. The only difference being that in my example there is already a virtual machine installed. And even though the currently installed VM is Windows XP, we can still install another XP instance. You can have as many instances of a single OS as you want so long as you have the room for it.

With that said, let’s begin the process.

The first thing to do is to click the New button which will start up the Wizard. This wizard, just like the setup wizard shown in the original article, is very user-friendly and makes for installing a virtual machine a breeze.

The first screen is just a welcome screen – click the Next button to move on to the first real interactive screen.

Figure 2

OS Name/Type

The first screen (shown in Figure 2) will require you to give the VM a name and select the operating system. Since I already have a VM called Windows XP I will name this new version something different.

After you have configured the name and the OS type click the Next button to move on.

Virtual Memory

The next screen requires you to select the amount of memory you want to dedicate to your Virtual Machine. Use caution with this setting. You have to still have enough memory left for your host operating system to run. By default VirtualBox will offer you the minimum required to run the virtual machine. This is fine if you don’t plan on doing much with the VM. If, however, you plan on running particular applications that are memory intensive, you should bump up the virtual memory a bit.

Hard Drive

This next screen was explained in detail in the original article – refer back to that for details. Once you have finished that section, you are ready to finalize your virtual machine and begin installation. Click Finish and you’re ready.

Powering it on

Now put your OS cd into the CD drive, select the virtual machine you want to use, and click the Start button. The first thing you will see is an information box instructing you how to capture and rekease your cursor. This is important to know, otherwise you will find yourself not being able to use your mouse outside of VirtualBox. To capture the cursor in VirtualBox you just click the mouse inside of the machine window. To release the cursor you hit the Ctrl key on the right side of your keyboard. That’s it. Click through that warning and you’re ready to rock.

Figure 3

What happens now is pretty much a standard installation of Windows. This will generally take about the same amount of time a normal installation will take. When you are finished you will have a working install of Windows XP (as shown in Figure 3).

You will notice XP is inside of a window. Within that window is a menu with three choices. One of those menus you will use quite often is the Machine menu. Of course you can not get to it if the virtual machine has captured your cursor. If you are working within your VM, and you want to get to that menu, click the right Ctrl key and your cursor is released.

From the Machine menu you can do a number of things such as:

• Change the view mode to full screen.
• Take a snapshot of the current state of your virtual machine.
• Pause your virtual machine.
• Shutdown your virtual machine.
• Close your virtual machine.

Figure 4

Instead of going through the standard process of shutting down Windows XP the easiest method of shutdown is to first Pause the virtual machine and then Close the virtual machine. When you pause the VM the screen will turn gray (see Figure 4) and you can then close that machine.

When you click Close you will see another window asking if you want to just close the machine or if you want to save the machine state before you close it. If you haven’t saved the machine recently go ahead and select save machine state.

Now when you start that Virtual Machine back up it will start up in the same state it was when you closed it. Imagine starting up Windows XP in less than 5 seconds! That is what you will experience when starting a virtual machine from a saved state.

When all of your machines are closed you can then exit VirtualBox from the File menu of the main window.

Final thoughts

I hope your experience with VirtualBox is as good as mine. I have used a number of virtual machine software – from costly proprietary to free open source and I have to say that VirtualBox is one of the best.