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== Virtual Machine General Settings ==
The ''General'' category of virtual machine settings consists of four different categories groups of settings arrange arranged on tabbed pages labeled ''Basic'', ''Advanced'', ''Description'' and ''Other'':
=== Basic Settings ===
* '''Enable ACPI''' - Enables and disables Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI) support for the virtual machine allowing the guest operating system to perform power management tasks on the virtual machine's virtual devices and hardware.
* '''Enable I/O APIC''' - Enables and disable support for Advanced Programmable Interrupt Controllers (ACIP). This latest generation of interrupt controllers eliminate the 16 Interrupt Request (IRQ) limit present in old Porgammable Programmable Interface Controllers (PIC). I/O APIC must be enabled when installing 64-bit guest operating systems.
* '''Enable VT-x/AMD-V''' - Defines whether VirtualBox will take advantage of the hardware virtualization features present in Intel-VT and AMD-V capable processors. For more details on this topic refer to the chapter entitled [[An Overview of VirtualBox 2]]. Note that if hardware virtualization is enabled for one virtual machine it must be enabled for all other concurrently running virtual machines on the host.
* '''Enable Nested Paging''' - Controls whether the Nested Paging feature of hardware virtualization capable CPUs is enabled for the virtual machine.
* '''Enable PAE/NX''' - Enables or disables ''Physical Address Extension'' and NX for the virtual machine when these features are supported by the host hardware. The purpose of this feature is to allow operating systems to access more than 4GB of memory. In practice this option is only provided for compatibility with some operating systems and does not actually increase the amount of memory available to the virtual machinewhen enabled.
* '''Shared Clipboard''' - When VirtualBox Guest Additions are installed in the guest operating system, this setting controls how clipboard data is shared between the guest and the host. In ''Bi-directional'' mode, clipboard data is automatically shared between the host and the guest. In ''Host to Guest'' mode, only the host's clipboard data is shared with the guest (data saved to the guest clipboard is not visible to the host). Conversely, ''Guest to Host'' makes only the guest data available to the host.
* '''IDE Controller''' - Changes the type of IDE hardware controller presented to the guest operating system. Useful when adding a virtual disk created by a competing virtualization product which may have used a different virtual IDE controller.
To add new hard disks, either click on the top button on the right hand side of the page (displaying an icon consisting of disk drives and a plus sign), right click on any of the empty space in the list pane and select ''Add Attachment'' from the menu or press the ''Ins'' key on the keyboard. A new disk drive may then be added, either by attaching an existing disk to creating a new disk image using the ''Create New Virtual Disk'' wizard.
Existing attachments may be removed my by selecting the disk drive from the list and clicking on the ''Remove Attachment'' button, right clicking on any of the empty space in the list pane and select ''Remove Attachment'' from the menu, or pressing the ''Del'' key on the keyboard.
Detaching a virtual disk from a controller does not delete the virtual disk. To delete virtual disks, click on the third button to the right of the list (the folder with the green up arrow) to launch the ''Virtual Media Manager'' where virtual disks may be deleted if required.
If a CD or DVD device is to be made available to the guest operating system , the ''Mount CD/DVD Drive'' option must first be selected. Once selected, the remaining options on the screen are enabled. The CD/DVD device presented to the virtual machine may be in the form of a physical device connected to the host, or an ISO image file visible to the host operating system. In the case of an ISO image, the file must be added to the media library using the ''Virtual Media Manager'' before it can be attached to a virtual machine. To access the Virtual Media Manager, click on the button located to the right of the ISO image file menu.
When using a physical device connected to the host, the option is also available to ''Enable Passthrough''. This option allows the guest operating system to send ATAPI commands directly to the physical device so that CD/DVD writers can be used from within the virtual machine.
== Network Settings ==
The Network settings screen allows up to four network adapters to be configured on the virtual machine. Additional adapters (up to a total of eight) can be configured using the ''VBoxManage'' command-line tool. By default, a single network adapter is enabled for new virtual machines using NAT to access the network (whereby the virtual machine accesses the network using a network adapter installed in the host, but appears to other computers on the network using the same IP address as the host).
VirtualBox networking is covered in detail in the chapter entitled [[Configuring VirtualBox Networking]].
The settings screen also provides the option to enable USB 2.0 (ECHI) support. Once USB support is enabled, the physical USB devices which are to made available to the guest operating system are controlled by creating filters. These filters are added and removed using the button buttons in the vertical toolbar located on the right hand side of the list area.
The top button creates a filter which makes all USB devices available to the guest operating system. The second button displays a list of USB devices currently attached to the host computer and creates a filter for the device selected from the list. The third button alolows allows properties of the currently selected filter to be edited (such as the filter name, device vendor ID, product ID and manufacturer).
The fourth button removes the selected filter from the list and the bottom two button move position of the selected filter up and down in the list.
