Getting USB devices working with VirtualBox in Ubuntu Hardy Heron (8.04)

My laptop screen finally died (there had been ominous flickers before). Thankfully it died now before I used it for any school work.

I was using my laptop to back up my PDA with Windows. I wanted a way to back up my Palm PDA which I use

I got the devices to show in the Virtualbox USB devices menu, but they were grayed out until I followed Hardy Heron, using USB devices in VB how-to - Notebook Forums and Laptop Discussion. Now I can use my printer and Palm Desktop software from Windows XP Pro running on VirtualBox on top of Windows.

Now on to more unpacking and organizing. Classes start tomorrow. I'll start off with Numerical Analysis.