VirtualBox CompareExchange128 Error

Over the past few days, the Internet has been abuzz with articles, Tweets and showcases of Windows 8.1 Preview and Visual Studio 2013 Preview. My curiosity got the better of me, so last night I decided to give Windows 8.1 Preview a whirl.

So as any good intrepid explorer will do, I decided to install this on a Virtual Machine (My weapon of choice being Virtualbox – current version 4.2.14). VirtualBox is truly one of my most favourite development tools I have and I use it on a daily basis.

I fired up my VM and proceeded to mount the Windows 8.1 Preview ISO. The installation started executing quite smoothly but unfortunately after a minute or two later I was presented with a curious error. “You can’t install Windows 8.1 Preview because your processor doesn’t support CompareExchange128”. (more…)