How to Install Windows 10 Technical Preview on VirtualBox
The news is old now that Windows 10 has been launched, Windows users are now downloading and installing Windows 10 technical preview on their computers. The rapid downloading of Windows 10 technical preview by users has made Microsoft’s servers poky. I’m telling this for the third time to my users that it’s just a preview of Windows 10, not the actual version. So, here is something very precious to keep in mind that this version may features bugs and if you’re going to upgrade to this Windows’ version then you’ll loose your current version.
The best thing is to test this Windows 10 preview is to install it on a virtual machine like virtualbox. VirtualBox is powered by Oracle and allows windows users to run two operating systems concurrently, one on their own machine and other on VirtualBox. So let’s start the process to install Windows 10 technical preview on VirtualBox.
Important: To successfully install Windows 10 on a VirtualBox, download Windows 10’s iso using this guide.
Setting up Virtual Machine
Step 1: First of all download VirtualBox from here and install it on your machine.
Note: I’m going use 32-bit version of Windows 10 for this tutorial.
Step 2: After installation of VirtualBox, now you need to set-up a virtual machine in which you’ll run Windows 10. For this purpose, open up the installed VirtualBox software and click on the “New” button available on the top left of the screen. Thereafter set desired name of your virtual machine and also select “Microsoft Windows” from the type and “other Windows” from the drop down menu.
Step 3: When you’ll click on next button, it’ll ask you to allocate the RAM to this virtual machine, you have to set it higher than the official requirements of RAM for Windows 10, that’s 1GB. Check out system requirements for Windows 10 here. I’ve set it to 1.5GB in this tutorial.
Step 4: After clicking next, you have to set disk space to this virtual machine, the required disk space for Windows 10 is 16GB, you’re just required to mark the default option i.e. “create a virtual hard drive now” and click “Create”. The default option will allocate 20GB of space to your VM.
Step 5: Now choose the default one from the next available screen, that is VDI (VirtualBox Disk Image) and click next.
Step 6: From the configuration of “Storage on physical hard drive” mark “Fixed size” radio button. Click next and then click “Create”. it will start the process of creating the virtual machine.
After few minutes your virtual machine will be ready for work. Now we are going to run Windows 10 iso image on this virtual machine to proceed installation process of Windows 10 technical preview.
Install Windows 10 on Virtual Machine
Step 1: Open VirtualBox and click on “settings” from the top left of the screen. In the settings first go to System> Motherboard tab and mark the “Enable I/O APIC” option.
Step 2: Now go to System> Processor and mark “Enable PAE/NX and after that click on “Storage tab.
Step 3: From the storage tab, click on the browse file button, available on the right side of the interface’s screen and select and open the downloaded Windows 10 iso file. Finally click ok.
Step 4: Go to the home screen of VirtualBox and click on “start” button and follow the process of Windows installation. The Installation process is same as discussed here.
After following the whole guide explained above, you’ll successfully install Windows 10 technical preview on VirtualBox and similarly you can install any Windows version with the help of this guide.
