If you haven’t gotten around to trying out VirtualBox 3 yet, you should. I finally made some time to install the Windows 7 RC inside of it, and I’m stunned. It’s a much better experience than Virtual PC or VMWare and it’s totally free. Whod’ve thought that Sun would release something so useful for free? I didn’t even have to install Java. 
After a little fiddling, I even managed to get hardware Direct3D and OpenGL working inside of Windows 7. Here’s a short clip of me fiddling with a hardware-accelerated Windows 7 game, and Paint, on top of my Windows XP desktop (thanks to VirtualBox’s neat ‘Seamless’ mode, which appears to be similar to VMWare’s Fusion feature.)
A quick how-to guide if you’re interested in trying out the setup in the video:
- Install VirtualBox 3
- Create a virtual machine configured for Windows 7. Enable all the shiny goodies, like hardware 3D.
- Install Windows 7, preferably using the downloadable Windows 7 RC ISO. You can grab it from Microsoft’s site and set the ISO as your CD/DVD-ROM drive in the VirtualBox settings.
- Once Windows 7 is installed, install the VirtualBox Guest Additions. This enables pointer integration and makes graphics work better, along with enabling Seamless mode.
- Download the WineD3D installer onto your Windows 7 virtual machine, preferably the desktop. You should be able to just use IE to do it inside win7, if you turned on NAT when installing VirtualBox and configuring your virtual machine.
- Boot Windows 7 into safe mode (you may need to spam the F5/F8 keys when the virtual machine is booting to get the safe mode menu).
- Open Windows Explorer as Administrator (Start menu, accessories, Windows Explorer, right click it and pick Run as Administrator)
- Navigate to C:\Windows\System32
- Right click the downloaded WineD3D installer, and select Run as Administrator.
- Continue with the WineD3D install process. Each time you get an ‘unable to write to file foo.dll’ error message:
- Go to that Explorer window and find the respective file (like d3d8.dll)
- Right click the file and select Properties
- Click over to the Security tab and click the Edit button
- Grant ‘Full Control’ to the Administrators group.
- After following those steps, you can click Retry on the error message and the install will continue to the next file.
- After changing permissions to a few DirectX files, the install will complete. Reboot your virtual machine into normal mode and you should now have hardware 3D in both Direct3D and OpenGL apps inside your Windows 7 virtual machine.
