What Is Oracle Vm Virtualbox Really Doing?

I inherited my Lenovo ThinkCentre M75e 5042A7U (running Windows 7 Pro). It has Oracle VM VirtualBox v4.2.14r86644 installed on it, which Wikipedia says is a type-2 (hosted) "hypervisor" or virtual machine monitor that runs "one or more virtual machines".

Is this something I really want? I'm wondering if some really sophisticated malware could commandeer VirtualBox and use it to run covert virtual machines on my computer to do who-knows-what?

I know - I'm being paranoid. I mean, really, I admit it. But better safe than sorry.

 

If you have no intention of running other operating systems from within Win 7 then just uninstall it, VMs can be fun though - love 'em myself. If the previous owner used VMs you will have some pretty big virtual disk files you could delete. Look in Program Data

 

Maybe it would be fun to play with it, but there IS a ton of data in Program Data. Would it be all right to keep VirtualBox but delete some or all of this data?

 

I don't know enough about such things to determine that, any suggestions? But for what it's worth, in VirtualBox, File > Virtual Media Manager shows nothing, and Machine shows New and Add as the only active options, so if I had to guess, I'd say that the previous owner of this computer never used VirtualBox. That sounds plausible, he wasn't all that tech-savvy.

Incidentally, ProgramData takes up about 7 GB on this 500 GB disk, on which only about 44 GB is free.

Again, I don't know enough about such things to determine that, any suggestions?

That sounds like an excellent idea, it makes me think I should really keep VirtualBox. But as a possible alternative, what about testing software in a sandbox?

Do you think it would it be very time-consuming to get myself up to speed on this?

 

Go into Programmes and Features in Control Panel look for it there and uninstall it. If the previous owner had any Virtual Machines installed they will be listed in a folder "Virtual Machines" in the "Documents" folder. Simply delete the lot. You will not have done any harm by doing so BUT make sure that "VMware Workstation" is properly uninstalled first.

 

I guess there's no way keep VirtualBox but get rid of ANYTHING in ProgramData, so I'll uninstall VirtualBox then. There isn't a "Virtual Machines" folder in the "Documents" folder, BTW.

 

If there is nothing in the Documents folder then it means that the owner has installed Virtual Box but has not loaded any "other" virtual systems. You can uninstall the parent programme safely. Invest in the Revo Uninstaller Free Edition when uninstalling something in future. Revo uninstalls everyting connected to the parent and you have no worries with it.

 

VirtualBox is only about 137MB, so that won't free up much space, and I might want to eventually play with it anyway.

But the user data of the person I inherited this computer from amounts to over 6GB, so I'll look through that to see if there's anything I want to keep and delete the rest.

On the suggestion of folks here at GM, I've installed IObit Uninstaller, and I really like it. Have you tried that? If you have, then I take it you prefer Revo.

 

I have tried IObit and I must admit that it certainly delivers the goods. What I didn't like though was the continual background stuff that it wanted to install. I found that if I didn't watch the install I ended up with "Systems Checkers" and all sorts of whatnots. It seems that all companies (or some anyway) do this. And yes I do prefer Revo its straightforward and gets the job done

 

Good to know, I HATE sneaky bundleware. I have had a couple of bundleware installs, but I don't recall if any of them occurred after I installed IObit. Thanks, Ewen.

 

I won't use Iobit either, and for the same reason. You might want to try GeekUninstaller, as good as Revo Pro but free. Free Revo doesn't uninstall any 64 bit software.

 

Well, I've already got IObit installed, and at least as of late, I haven't noticed anything installed that I don't want that makes itself noticeable.