

Now, it’s time to wrap up the whole process by installing drivers, as you would with any other machine. Keep carrying through the installation as with a normal Windows installation. Once it’s near completion, you will reach this screen. Your Windows 7 virtual machine might restart every so often, which is to be expected. Although on the bright side, it does take less time than the old Windows XP or Vista did. Go and get some coffee, because Windows 7 takes a while to install. Select the only hard drive available, and press next to continue. Your virtual machine should boot into Windows setup, and you will be met by this screen. You can simply click inside the virtual machine to transition back from Mac cursor to Windows cursor. When in doubt, the default key to switch from Windows cursor to Mac cursor is the left ⌘. Navigating through VirtualBox might require capturing your cursor.

iso file, browse through your hard drive to its location. Select the DVD drive you’d like VirtualBox to read if you have a physical copy of Windows 7, or if you have a. When you start it up, you will see the First Run Wizard pop up.

Now that your virtual machine is complete, it’s time to run it. Here’s a summary of what your VirtualBox virtual machine should resemble. Keep in mind there is no easy solution to tweaking hard drive size, so I’d be a bit more careful with this selection. Windows 7 itself takes up around 10GB, so I was generous and gave my virtual hard drive around 60GB of storage. Conversely, if you chose a fixed-size storage virtual hard drive, the 60GB of storage would be unavailable from the get-go even if you don’t fill up your virtual hard drive. For example, if you chose to have a dynamically expanding storage virtual hard drive of 60GB and only had Windows 7 and Microsoft Office on there, the virtual hard drive itself would take up less than 20GB of space on your Mac. I chose to go with a dynamically expanding hard drive because it allows space to be more flexible, and takes up only as much space your Virtual Hard Drive does. The amount of RAM is adjustable and can be tweaked, so don’t worry about it too much. So far, Windows 7 is running well for me. I have 2GB of RAM, so I went with the recommended 512MB of memory. Keep in mind the amount of RAM you put into your virtual machine could greatly adjust performance, but can also adversely affect performance of the host computer (your Mac). You’re setting up Windows 7, so remember to select that in the setup process. You can do this by running VirtualBox and click blue spiky New icon. Once VirtualBox is installed, you can create your own Virtual Machine. mpkg installer and when you’re done, run it from your Applications folder. Set up the file according to the instructions. Save the version for Intel Macs to your computer, and run it. First, visit the VirtualBox website to download the.
