Changing the CPU displayed in About System menu

[Nevyn04]

Hello all. I am new to virtualbox and have it up and running flawlessly. I only have one minor issue i will explain below.

As with a lot of different companies lately I am now work from home. My company sent me home with the VERY under powered work computer they supply. When i say under powered, its a dual core Intel i3. I was able to put the hard drive on my personal computer and create a virtual box to run it, but when i go to settings/system/about it shows my main pc's hardware. Ryzen 9 3900x.

My company IT regularly remote connects to ensure that all our computers encryptions are in place and the computer is working normally.

I'd like it to show as if it was running off the crap hardware supplied.

The work hard drive is an exact copy and everything runs exactly as it did before, same encryption, same admin account and everything.

My account does not have admin access. So I cannot change anything on it. I know how to make my host pc show whatever cpu I'd like (with regedit), but that doesn't transfer over to the running virtual machine, it still shows Ryzen.

With the work I do, a few extra cores would be extremely beneficial to me. I'd rather not be stuck with two if I don't have to be.

Any insight would be appreciated, if this is even possible without admin access on the guest drive.

Thank you.

[scottgus1]

Regrettably, what you want to do is not possible. The one and only piece of physical host PC hardware the guest OS sees is the host CPU. The guest OS will see and report the CPU change and there is no way to mask it. (not to mention that if IT learns that you 'hacked' your work computer they'll tell the bosses and corporate will have your head on a silver platter... )

It might be better to have a casual conversation with your boss that the lack of power in the work computer interferes with your work speed (if it really does) and that a virtual machine on your host PC runs faster. Maybe s/he will go to bat for you with IT.

[pt58]

There is a command line which allows you to spoof the CPU type which is displayed in the VM.

Unfortunately, there is only a limited number of CPU types which it can be set to and none of them are Core i3.

VBoxManage modifyvm "<VM name>" --cpuidset
Try the following CPU profiles, of course while the VM is completely shut down, and rebooting your VM in between the changes:

VBoxManage modifyvm "<VM name>" --cpu-profile "Intel Xeon X5482 3.20GHz"
VBoxManage modifyvm "<VM name>" --cpu-profile "Intel Core i7-2635QM"
VBoxManage modifyvm "<VM name>" --cpu-profile "Intel Core i7-3960X"
VBoxManage modifyvm "<VM name>" --cpu-profile "Intel Core i5-3570"
VBoxManage modifyvm "<VM name>" --cpu-profile "Intel Core i7-5600U"
VBoxManage modifyvm "<VM name>" --cpu-profile "Intel Core i7-6700K"

[scottgus1]

Interesting, pt58! I did not know abut these commands.

I just tried one on a XP guest that previously showed in the Device Manager:

Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-2430M CPU @ 2.40GHz

I ran:

VBoxManage modifyvm "<VM name>" --cpu-profile "Intel Core i5-3570"

and after several minutes of churning and a reboot, the Device Manager now shows:

Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-3570 CPU @ 3.40GHz

Upgrade! (not )

So the guest apparently will show the vboxmanage command's processor in the Device Manager. But, as you point out, there's no i3's.

[fth0]

If you ever need the full list of CPU profiles, take a look at the links inside viewtopic.php?f=4&t=95714#p463792. But there is no "Intel Core i3" in the full list either.

[mpack]

Perhaps it relies some kind of virtualized CPUID reporting that was introduced in the i5.

Personally I find this CPUID spoofing feature very dubious. None of my software ever checks the CPUID, because I want my code to run on all of them. If I did check the CPUID I expect it would be to check if it was ok rely on obscure features of specific CPUs, so it would be pretty dangerous to lie to me...