virtualbox.org

My son runs a fully patched Windows 8.1 home OS on a Lenovo laptop. I don't recall the model right now. When we tried to install the current (as of this posting) VirtualBox 4.3.10-93012 on his machine, we get a screen that says the application cannot run on this PC. We never get to the setup include/exclude dialogs, so we're nowhere close to the usual interface issues that we saw while trying to run down this error. Has anyone seen this sort of installation error with a Win 8.1 OS?

TIA,
Jerry

Did you use "Run as administrator" to run the installer?

My ignorance of 8.1 is going to show here, but I did assume that as the single user defined on his laptop, that he is administrator. Does Win8.1 require you to su up to admin, so to speak, or is it a role that the one defined user on a Win8.1 box would already have by default.

I hope the answer is that I'm an idiot, and yes, I need to change his role to admin, and try again.

I'm not a Win8 user, but I believe there are a number of features enabled by default, e.g. if you didn't do a custom install. The user will not have admin rights and hence may not have write permission in certain system folders - you should use "Run as administrator" to avoid this. Second, Win64 has introduced something called "Driver Signature Enforcement" which may be configured to silently reject non-MS drivers whether you run as admin or not. Google for info on this: you want it to at least prompt you. Finally, it may enable the Hyper-v VM service on boot by default, which will prevent other VM platforms from running if they need VT-x, which VirtualBox needs for all 64bit guests, and all Win8 and Win2012 guests.