Installing Guest Additions to the Windows XP Guest After installing the OS, I would recommend installing Guest Additions to your Windows XP machine. There is an entire chapter of the VirtualBox Manual ...

VirtualBox is flexible enough to handle many types of 32-bit and 64-bit configurations. If you need to run a 32-bit version of XP in a 64-bit host, you can do that without any problems.

For those times when you absolutely must still run Windows XP, one safer way of doing it is to run XP in a virtual machine using the Oracle VirtualBox hypervisor on Linux Mint.

VirtualBox is a general-purpose full virtualizer for x86 hardware. Targeted at server, desktop and embedded use, it is a professional-quality virtualization solution that is also Open Source Software.

With Windows 7, I decided to give it a more generous 40GB. You can also let VirtualBox dynamically determine how much hard drive room an operating system can have, but I prefer to decide for myself.