Bridged Network devices freeze Windows 7
Posted: 26. Jun 2011, 22:26
Hello,
About a year ago, I acquired an ASUS n71jq machine, which came with Windows 7 64-bit. Pretty much from day 1 it seemed to randomly freeze. There would be no indication of disk activity, or overheating...no blue screen. Instead, I would just see a frozen image of the screen. If any sound was playing at the time, that would get 'frozen' too, such that the speakers would keep playing whatever tone was being played a the moment that the system had frozen.
Until a week ago, I was fairly convinced this was either a hardware issue, a Win7 issue, or a combination of the two. It was pretty random, but last week the system seemed to freeze on each bootup within the first minute. I found that if I logged-in quickly enough, I could observe that the crash would occur around the time that the wireless network tried to connect. So, after booting into safe mode (which does not crash), I looked at the device manager, and noticed the virtualbox bridged adapters listed there. After disabling those, I was able to reboot and use the machine without problems.
At that point, I had been using VirtualBox 3.2...so after I had my system cleaned-up and backed-up, I installed VirtualBox 4.0.8. It seemed to be working fine for a couple days, until today it started again...and disabling the bridged adapters again allowed me to resume using the system. I've now reinstalled VirtualBox without the bridged adapters, although this is a bit inconvenient.
I should note that on the same machine, running Linux along with VirtualBox has never produced any problems such as this.
Is anyone aware of problems with Windows 7 freezing with VirtualBox's bridged adapters, and is there a way to fix or debug the problem? I'm also not 100% sure this is the source of the problem, as the crash was unpredictable, and it could be fluke that it doesn't crash immediately after I remove the bridged adapters.
About a year ago, I acquired an ASUS n71jq machine, which came with Windows 7 64-bit. Pretty much from day 1 it seemed to randomly freeze. There would be no indication of disk activity, or overheating...no blue screen. Instead, I would just see a frozen image of the screen. If any sound was playing at the time, that would get 'frozen' too, such that the speakers would keep playing whatever tone was being played a the moment that the system had frozen.
Until a week ago, I was fairly convinced this was either a hardware issue, a Win7 issue, or a combination of the two. It was pretty random, but last week the system seemed to freeze on each bootup within the first minute. I found that if I logged-in quickly enough, I could observe that the crash would occur around the time that the wireless network tried to connect. So, after booting into safe mode (which does not crash), I looked at the device manager, and noticed the virtualbox bridged adapters listed there. After disabling those, I was able to reboot and use the machine without problems.
At that point, I had been using VirtualBox 3.2...so after I had my system cleaned-up and backed-up, I installed VirtualBox 4.0.8. It seemed to be working fine for a couple days, until today it started again...and disabling the bridged adapters again allowed me to resume using the system. I've now reinstalled VirtualBox without the bridged adapters, although this is a bit inconvenient.
I should note that on the same machine, running Linux along with VirtualBox has never produced any problems such as this.
Is anyone aware of problems with Windows 7 freezing with VirtualBox's bridged adapters, and is there a way to fix or debug the problem? I'm also not 100% sure this is the source of the problem, as the crash was unpredictable, and it could be fluke that it doesn't crash immediately after I remove the bridged adapters.
