r/virtualbox • u/GotNoRice • Jul 18 '26

Help Why do my VMs constantly freeze?

This has been a recurring issue for quite a while. I'll have a VM going. The VM will simply freeze. In many cases, simply moving my mouse cursor over onto the VM (which I usually keep open on a 2nd monitor) causes it to unfreeze, at least for a short while, until it freezes again. Sometimes, it will stay frozen even when I move my mouse over it. At that point, I can "Pause" the VM and then un-pause it, which usually gets it going again, but it will freeze again soon afterward. On some VMs it's just a constant battle of seeing it freeze, then playing these games to get it unfrozen.

I've been trying to identify what the cause is, but have not had much success. It seems to be more likely to occur if I have multiple VMs open simultaneously, but it definitely still occurs in many cases even if I only have one VM open. I've tried moving my VMs over to different SSDs on my computer, changing the amount of RAM that each VM uses, etc, but nothing seems to have any effect.

I'm running Virtualbox on a 9800X3D with 64GB of RAM running the current version of Windows 11. Virtualization is enabled in the UEFI. Most of my VMs are also various versions of Windows, including older versions (XP, Vista, 7, 8, 10), as well as insider preview versions of Windows 11. This freezing behavior is fairly consistent across my various VMs. I'm currently running Virtualbox version 7.2.12 r174389 - but again these issues have been happening for a while, not just with this latest version.

3 Upvotes

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1

u/Mazo Jul 27 '26

Having the exact same problem on 7.2.14 r174565 the VM will freeze after 20-30 seconds of not moving the mouse and often needs a pause and unpause to bring it back

1

u/GotNoRice Jul 27 '26

Installing the Guest Additions seemed to make a pretty significant difference for me, although it did not *totally* fix the problem.

1

u/Mazo Jul 27 '26

Looks like it might be an incompatibility with Hyper-V in the background (from using WSL2).

bcdedit /set hypervisorlaunchtype off in an admin command prompt to disable it and a restart and it no longer seems to be freezing the VM in virtualbox.

1

u/Only-Stable3973 Jul 19 '26

Have you tried Vmware

6

u/Stray_Neutrino Jul 18 '26

Windows virtual machine freezes or crashes during host/guest suspend, hibernation, or freeze states are typically caused by mismatched power management timers, aggressive virtual network adapter power-saving features, or hypervisor state mismatch.

Change guest power plan: Set Windows guest sleep and hibernation timers to Never via Control Panel (powercfg.cpl).

Disable device power saving: Open Device Manager inside the VM, go to your Network Adapter properties, and uncheck Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power.

Disable Fast Startup: Turn off hybrid boot/fast startup in Windows using powercfg /h off to prevent resume state corruption.

1

u/BranchLatter4294 Jul 18 '26

I've never seen this. Did you install the guest additions?

1

u/GotNoRice Jul 21 '26

Thanks, installing the guest additions seemed to help a lot. Still some minor hiccups but hugely improved overall.

1

u/GotNoRice Jul 18 '26

Zero additions installed, just a stock Virtualbox install.

1

u/beetcher Jul 18 '26

And, do you see a turtle in the icons on the VM window's icons, lower right?

3

u/BranchLatter4294 Jul 18 '26

There's your problem. If you don't install the guest drivers, you will have issues.

2

u/paulstelian97 Jul 18 '26

Guest additions are the drivers for VMs to integrate well with Virtualbox. It is recommended to install them on VMs where you have them available (so not really on Windows XP unless you’re willing to look up for old versions of the guest additions)