Firstly - my VM setup:
I’m running Virtualbox with Xubuntu 9.10 on Win7 host - and its pretty. Its on a office standard issue Dell D531 - meaning they’re AMD Turion X2 TL-60 and 2GB of RAM.
Now the Turion’s supposed to have hw virtualization (AMD-V) however, the moment hw virtualization was enabled in virtualbox and I tried starting the vm, the machine would hard reboot!!!
After searching high and low, turns out that its an issue with Dell bioses and they dont have any updates. Here’s a page that tracks the issue. Imagine my happiness when a couple of days ago, found that dell had released an unofficial bios update (T12).Well, its gone in, and things are running swimmingly well - my VM now has 2 procs, is stable and I hardly feel I’m in a VM :). In fact, this post is coming from the VM - firefox with 12 tabs, a few terminals and emacs running on 600 MB of RAM.
Now let me come to the new tool I was talking about
I like to run the VM full screen - feels best that way. After trying out enough and more of multiple desktop softwares, have finally settled on VirtuaWin - beats the crap out of other tools, systray integration is great, has window rules and so on. Over the past couple of weeks, its come close to the ideal tool - does the job well and you hardly know its there :-)
