Update: I’d suggest checkout out James’ solution in the comments as an alternative to mine which doesn’t require 3rd party programs. I haven’t tested it yet so let me know if it works OK for you.

I’ve seen a few tutorials out there about setting up a headless Virtualbox service in windows in order to autostart a VM and wasted a few hours of my life following pages of instructions ending in giving up. I recently reinstalled windows 7 on my home HTPC/Server and wanted a linux VM to autostart whenever Windows decided to run updates and auto restart. I swore I wouldn’t attempt the awful services method again and would insead follow the principle of keep it simple stupid.

My only caveat in setting up this autostarting headless VM was that Windows 7 remain password protected when it started up (task scheduler’s on start trigger function didn’t prove much help with this goal BTW)…a little less simple but I managed to keep it under 3 steps somehow, mostly thanks to superuser’s superb knowledge base and some luck googling. Keep in mind I have a single user setup on this windows 7 machine. Multiple users might require you force the machine to always logon to your VirtualBox/Startup script user by default after a reboot…so you’ve been warned. Here’s how it’s done:

1. download hstart (see README)
2. Remove/un-check the “User must enter a username and password to use this computer” checkbox option from Start -> Run -> `control userpasswords2` (But wait…didn’t you just say…YES KEEP READING)
3. write a batch script in your startup folder containing (psudocode): C:/hstart.exe /NOCONSOLE “VMBoxHeadless.exe -start-vm ‘your-vm-name'” followed by “rundll32.exe user32.dll,LockWorkStation”

The name VMBoxHeadless is a bit misleading since you still have a cmd window to leave open as long as you want your VM running if you run it through a batch script, that’s where hstart comes in. Then you have to tell windows to logon automatically instead of waiting for the user to enter a username/password. Finally your batch script run VMBoxHeadless through hstart and then just re-locks your computer afterwards and you have a primed and ready VM waiting for you upon restart. If your VM name has spaces it might require escaped quotes or single quotes around it, I used a hyphen in my name so I didn’t have to deal with that problem.

Here’s an eaxmple batch script

C:\Users\HTPC\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Startup\hstart a-serv headless.bat:

"E:\scripts\hstart64.exe" /NOCONSOLE "C:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox\VBoxHeadless.exe -startvm a-serv" 
rundll32.exe user32.dll,LockWorkStation

References (yay superuser!)
What is the best way to hide a command prompt window?
Command line cmd command to lock a windows machine

Steam Cloud in games like Valve’s Half Life franchise and Torchlight is really handy for synchronizing save games across laptops/desktops or work computers. But I want it in more games! So I did it my self with some easy symbolic links and a Dropbox account (signup for one now using my link if you don’t have one yet). Here are two quick examples of how you would make Minecraft and Dragon Age: Origins saves go to your dropbox rather than your user account tied to your computer.  You’ll have to do this on each computer you want to syncronize save games to the cloud.  Keep in mind, if you don’t know what you’re doing and screw up you might loose your saves by trying this so here’s your warning: Back up your save folders before running the below commands.

I’m writing the symbolic link commands so they are as copy pastable as possible, for multiple windows releases. If all else fails, use the full path rather than the environment variable (%APPDATA%, %HOMEPATH%).

Lets Begin, first make a folder in your dropbox folder called ‘Game Saves’ to house your new save games. Then within this new saves folder make a folder for your games, (e.g. Minecraft/Dragon Age)

Now you need to know where your save game folder is for each game, we’ll start with Minecraft. In either windows XP, Vista, or 7 you can just go to your Start button, Run (or windows+R shortcut) and enter `%APPDATA%\.minecraft\` and you’ll see the saves folder. Move it to some place safe or just rename it to “saves_backup”. Then you want to put another copy of the `saves` folder in your newly crated `Dropbox\Game Saves\Minecraft\` folder. [Note: Copying a large Minecraft saves folder can take a while because of the massive amount of tiny files used by Minecraft]

After that’s done successfully, open another Run prompt from the Windows Start menu and this time type in `cmd`. In the black DOS command prompt that opens enter this (Note you may need to change the Dropbox path if yours is “My Dropbox” or customized)

mklink /D "%APPDATA%\.minecraft\saves" "%HOMEPATH%\Dropbox\Save Games\Minecraft\saves"

For Dragon Age: Origins you should find your save games in `%HOMEPATH%\Documents\BioWare\Dragon Age`. Move and or backup the Characters folder. Then copy the Characters folder to `Dropbox\Game Saves\Dragon Age Origins\`

mklink /D "%HOMEPATH%\Documents\BioWare\Dragon Age\Characters" "%HOMEPATH%\Dropbox\Save Games\Dragon Age\Characters"

Just to reiiterate the fact you have to change your path, here is another command I had to run using a different dropbox path (one computer used ‘My Dropbox’, the other just used ‘Dropbox’ for some reason).

mklink /D "%HOMEPATH%\Documents\BioWare\Dragon Age\Characters" "%HOMEPATH%\My Dropbox\Save Games\Dragon Age\Characters"

This concept is easily applied to any game. Just change the paths to match where that game’s saved files folder are located; usually they’re in my `documents/my saves`, or` my docuemnts/publisher name`, or one of application data’s folders.

I thought I’d make a list of applications I usually need after a fresh windows install and what order I install them in. Since this time I’m using Windows 7 (W7) Beta I’ll be commenting about major differences I take notice of about W7 along the way too – I’ve had tastes of Vista before so I know my way around their new control panel and other menu changes. Note I’m running the 64-bit version so some of my links are to 64-bit apps/drivers.

Windows 7 bugged me about anti virus right away so I grabbed that first…
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