Your PC is much more capable than its default settings suggest. Some of these settings are hidden in the BIOS menu, and changing them can unlock a significant performance boost.
Other settings are more functional and unlock capabilities beyond a simple performance increase. One specific option your system can benefit from is virtualization in the BIOS menu, helping create another virtual PC inside your current one.
What this BIOS setting actually does
How one PC learns to act like several, each thinking it has full resources
Virtualization creates a separate environment within the computer itself. Simply put, it means making your PC act like multiple different machines at once. In this setup, each virtual machine runs with its own resources borrowed from the host device: CPU, RAM, storage, bandwidth, and anything else required to run a system.
You can run more than one virtual machine inside Windows, but be mindful of your system’s resources and its ability to handle them. Running a whole extra operating system on your device can be very resource-intensive, especially if you’re attempting to run a modern operating system.
The entire stack starts with your physical hardware, then the virtualization technology itself, used to run the secondary PC via a hypervisor or virtual machine monitor (VMM), which is the software that creates a separate environment within your PC and manages how the hardware splits those resources.
You can then use the new virtual machine to install a guest operating system.
How to enable virtualization in BIOS
Four steps to flip VT-x/SVM Mode, depending on your CPU manufacturer
Virtualization is disabled by default because, despite its advantages, it comes with a security cost. Extra paths for system access can open the door to bugs and malware attacks. Moreover, it’s an advanced setting that the average PC user probably doesn’t need.
However, if you want to enable virtualization and run several environments on one system, follow these steps.
- Enter the BIOS by pressing either F2 or Delete.
- Go to Advanced/CPU configuration.
- Depending on whether you have an AMD or Intel system, you’ll see VT-x/SVM Mode — enable that setting.
- Save your BIOS changes and exit to enable virtualization.
Now, open Task Manager and check the CPU tab to see if virtualization is enabled.
What virtualization unlocks
Hyper-V, WSL2, and Windows Sandbox all run on the same toggle
With the option of a new virtual PC inside your current one, your system can do much more than just run more than one OS at a time.
- Windows Sandbox is one of the most straightforward uses of virtualization, and it uses Hyper-V to spin up a safe, temporary secondary Windows environment on top of the current one, where you can securely test suspicious files or make other changes to Windows without altering the main OS.
- WSL 2 expands on the multiple OSes concept and lets you run a real Linux kernel inside Windows as a separate application, using a lightweight VM managed by Hyper-V. You can download a lightweight Linux distro and run it inside Windows, run scripts, install packages, all while using both OSes normally as you would on separate machines. Docker Desktop also uses WSL 2 to run Linux containers inside Windows, so it’s easy to manage and run containerized applications.
- Hyper-V is a Type 1 hypervisor, Microsoft’s built-in hypervisor for Windows 11, and it sits beneath the OS, running alongside it with full control over your PC hardware and direct access. Windows controls the resource split between them, so you can run heavier VMs without giving them unrestrained access to physical hardware.
- VMware/VirtualBox give you complete control over resource assignment and the virtual machine, and they’re Type 2 hypervisors that run a VM as an application within the host OS. This type of hypervisor has slightly more overhead, but it allows for more convenient VM use.
Once you have those features up and running, you can use them to unlock other ways to use your machine.
Emulators get a real speed boost
BlueStacks and RPCS3 get near-direct CPU access instead of translating every step
Even though virtualization and emulation are vastly different concepts, since the latter imitates a different computer architecture while virtualization runs the same architecture virtually, enabling virtualization significantly improves emulation performance.
Virtualization can provide the emulator with near-direct access to the CPU for instructions, making it more efficient. When running an Android emulator like BlueStacks or a PlayStation emulator like RPCS3, you’ll notice a vast improvement in frame rates and speed.
RPCS3’s gains come mostly from faster memory exception handling, while BlueStacks improves from hardware-assisted virtualization for the Android layer, which reduces CPU overhead.
Windows also uses virtualization for security
Beyond hosting, virtualization also serves other purposes, like security. In fact, Virtualization-based Security (VBS) is a major Windows feature that creates an isolated environment to keep Windows safe from malware.
VBS also uses a hypervisor to isolate specific Windows processes from the rest of the system, and memory integrity checks whether kernel-level code can be trusted before it runs.
All of these security and multitasking features are available with a single toggle in the BIOS menu, unlocking a wide range of uses for your PC and expanding its use cases.