virtualbox.org

I recently had to reinstall after a boot drive failure, but I had most stuff on a different drive, so I reinstalled the VB engine, and re-set everything up, so now it's all good. Kinda...

One of my V machines is Win 7, and now when I run that machine, it tells me:

The virtual machine window is optimized to work in 32 bit color mode but the virtual display is set to 24 bit.
Please open the display properties dialog of the guest OS and select at 32 bit color mode, if it is available, for the best possible performance of the virtual video subsystem.

The problem is, I can't find such a setting. But also, it didn't do this before the reinstall.

How do I fix this?

Once the guest OS is working in every other sense, install the Guest Additions. That's probably all that's required.

Failing that, tuition on how to change Win7 display properties is beyond the scope of these forums! You do it in the normal Win7 way: right clicking the desktop and selecting "Properties" will probably see you off to a good start. The point is to ensure that you choose a 32bit color display mode.

Hmm, ok, now the problem is, I went and did as it said, found the bit depth in the guest OS and it was already on 32. But I moved it to 16, and then back to 32, and still get that error.

Users often encounter that error message in temporary situations, e.g. when booting in safe mode or text mode (depends on what the guest OS is). If your normal operating mode is correctly configured then don't worry about it. If it's a problem then just click the "Do not show this message again" checkbox on the error dialog.