Last Updated on December 1, 2019 by Christopher G Mendla
There are times when being able to run a virtual machine on your windows box could come in very handy.
For example, I was testing a website. I wanted to clear the cookies from my chrome browser but that would have caused problems with other work that was in process. I was able to fire up an Oracle VM VirtualBox machine and test the site with firefox.
You can download the VM VirtualBox at https://www.virtualbox.org/ . Installing and configuring it is relatively straightforward. Once the app is installed, you need to configure a virtual machine or machines.
Right now, I have pretty much of a default configuration for my virtual machine. There is an add on that will allow communication with network shares on my network but I haven’t done that yet. I have a box running Ubuntu and some basic tools such as Firefox and an Office work-alike.
In summary, a virtual machine is extremely handy when you want to test a site from a clean browser. It is also handy for more secure browsing where traces of your browsing history will be much harder to find.
The machine I am using is a newer quad core HP with 8GB of ram running Windows Home Premium.