Next, you must allocate enough storage space to install the operating system and have some room left over for applications. We recommend choosing the dynamic option. The latter is better for performance, but it will use up all of the space on your host drive at once. You must also decide whether to allocate your virtual hard drive dynamically or all at once. VirtualBox will ask you how much of your hard disk space it should use to create the virtual PC’s hard drive. Older versions don’t offer native support for Windows 8, and VirtualBox’s latest releases have greatly improved system usability while running Windows 8 on a virtual machine.Īfter you’ve allocated the RAM, click Create a virtual hard drive now. If you already have VirtualBox installed on your system, you can make sure that it’s current by clicking the Help menu at the top of the screen and selecting Check for Updates. Run the installer, and choose the default settings for all of the install options. While the Windows 8 ISO downloads, you should also download the latest version of VirtualBox for Windows. Wikipedia has a handy chart comparing the features available for the different editions of Windows 8, including Windows RT. Though some of those tools are come with with Windows 8 Pro, Windows 8 Enterprise users can’t download the Pro version’s $10 Windows Media Center pack (sorry, CableCard lovers). You also get IT-friendly tools such as BranchCache and AppLocker support. On the plus side, Windows 8 Enterprise packs some nifty features that you won’t find in the vanilla version of Windows 8, including BitLocker encryption, Hyper-V virtualization, and the intriguing Windows to Go, which allows the OS to boot from removable storage. So back up your data! The bottom line is that you shouldn’t use the evaluation version of Windows 8 Enterprise as your main operating system, which is why we recommend installing it in a virtual machine. Every app you’ve installed, and every file you’ve tinkered with, will be obliterated when the trial ends and you install another operating system. Instead, you have to uninstall it completely and start over with a non-evaluation version of the OS.
Second, you can’t upgrade from the evaluation version of Windows 8 Enterprise to a full version of Windows 8. First, the trial period expires in 90 days-at which point the OS will automatically shut down after every 60 minutes of use. Of course, Microsoft doesn’t give away Windows for free, and this evaluation version has a couple of major limitations.