[Solved] VirtualBox Suspends Guest after 10 min of Host Inactivity

[rzucker1]

VirtualBox puts my Guest machine (Windows XP) into sleep mode (suspends Windows XP) after 10 min if there is no keyboard activity on the host. The Guest (XP) shows the logon screen, and one must login again (click my user icon and enter password). Then applications running under XP resume.

I use the XP Virtual Machine to run extensive simulation programs written in 16-bit BASIC 7, which is not suppo0rted by Windows 10 (or Windows 7 for that matter). The simulations run for many hours, sometimes even days. It is not practical to sit in front of the computer for hours or days to just press a keyboard key every 10 minutes, or to re-awaken XP to resume virtual machine operation.

It seems real keyboard input is required. I have tried setting up a simple scheduled task that runs a tiny IP identification application and then shuts it down after 1 second, set to run every 9 minutes, on both the host and guest machines. These run properly, but do not prevent the guest suspension.

I have a 2.4 GHz Dell Optiplex 9020 with 8 GB RAM and Windows 10 x64 Pro running VirtualBox 5.1.16 with 512 MB base memory. XP works fine, as do BASIC 7 and my programs.

I believe this is a known problem, and I was able to find reports (with Google) of it earlier, but I can no longer find them with Google or on this forum, and I did not see any posted solutions.

Does anyone know how to fix this?

[socratis]

VirtualBox puts my Guest machine (Windows XP) into sleep mode

I believe this is a known problem

Unfortunately that would be a no on both statements. VirtualBox does nothing that the VM doesn't ask it to do, and no, it's not a widespread problem because it's not a VirtualBox problem.

What you need to do is to modify the power options in your guest. On any guest for that matter. For WinXP specifically go to Start » Settings » Control Panel » Power options » change the setting so that the guest never goes to sleep/hibernate.

[rzucker1]

I forgot to mention that i had already done that. XP Service Pack 2 Power Options do not have a sleep setting. There is a hibernate setting, and that is set to "Never." I have also turned off sleep in the Windows 10 host machine. I have found numerous suggestions to turn off sleep in the guest machine, but there is no way to do that in XP:

[socratis]

VirtualBox puts my Guest machine (Windows XP) into sleep mode (suspends Windows XP) after 10 min

XP Service Pack 2 Power Options do not have a sleep setting.

• Are you sure it's not SP3? If it isn't make it, i.e. upgrade from SP2 to SP3.
• That's as far as sleep will go for XP. This *is* their sleep.
• I really don't like the deterministic amount of time (10 min). It reminds of ... screen saver. How's that set?

[rzucker1]

Socrates,

Thank you, thank you. It was, indeed, the guest XP's screen saver! It was set to 10 min. Setting it to "none" solved the problem.

SOLVED! Terrific!!

[socratis]

I told you VirtualBox wasn't responsible...
Glad you got it working! I'll mark the thread as [Solved].