Review: VirtualBox 4.3 goes touchy-feely for Windows 8 virtualization

November 04, 2013

Historically, VirtualBox has been rock-solid, lightweight virtualization software that was only slightly less capable than its rival, VMware. Starting about a year and a half ago, VirtualBox became a bit less than that, acquiring new features, but becoming less reliable. Fortunately, the latest versions seem to have come back around, and 4.3 adds an important capability: support for touchscreens. VirtualBox 4 screenshotVirtualBox's management and launch dialog has improved over time and is quite easy to intuit at this point. I'm not a huge fan of fingerprints all over my screen, but as a user of tablets and smartphones I know it's part of the computing universe, and lots of folks like it. And with Windows 8.x designed for touch, it needs to be there in virtual environments. It is in VirtualBox and it worked well in my testing. Beyond the touch support, which is of course huge news, VirtualBox remains the quickest, least resource-hungry of the free virtual machine platforms. It basically stays out of the way when you're not running it, unlike others that spawn multiple services which are always present in the background. Touchscreen support makes it much more appealing to use VirtualBox on Windows 8. The other most user-recognizable improvements are support for IPv6 with VRDP, video capture support, and Webcam pass-thru. There's also SCSI CD-ROM emulation and a ton of bug fixes. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Link: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2058329/review-virtualbox-4-3-goes-touchy-feely-for-windows-8-virtualization.html#tk.rss_reviews