Wondering why VirtualBox and VMWare's Player both “capture” the mouse inside the Virtual Machine? Virtual PC 2007 works quite well if doesn't

Question

I wonder why VirtualBox and VMWare's Player both "capture" and bound the mouse pointer to the Virtual Machine and not let it come out, and needing to press RIGHT CTRL key or CTRL-ALT to come out.

Microsoft's Virtual PC 2007 actually just treat the VM as an app and let the mouse move freely in and out... and for the few months I have used it, I don't see any problem. So I wonder why VirtualBox and VMWare's Player do it that way and can it be configured that they don't?

Answer 1

Mouse is captured only until you install virtual machine additions. They include driver for virtual mouse and then mouse can be freely moved between host and guest.

Some versions of Windows (Vista, Windows 7, preconfigured Windows XP) already come with drivers for some virtual machine hosts and that is reason why you don't see this issue there. However, if you try to install clean version of e.g. Windows XP, you would have same mouse capturing (until you install VM additions).

Answer 2

The function you're looking for is a plugin called "Guest Additions" that's already included in the latest versions of Virtualbox. See the following guide on how to activate it

http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/virtualbox-guest-addons.html

VMWare has something similar, but I'm not familiar with it.