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Hi,

maybe this can help for other users with similar problems.

Yesterday I updatet VB after a long time from 5.0.0 to 5.0.10 on a Windows 10 Host System.
After that my Windows 8.1 Guest System was slower than before and sometimes froze for more than 10 seconds.

So I decided to downgrade VB stepwise back (5.0.8, 5.0.6) until my guest system was as fast again as before and without freezes.
I had to go back to 5.0.6 until I was satisfied again.

I downloaded the old versions and the the compatible extension pack both from the VB wiki: Download_Old_Builds_5_0 and did the following steps:

- Shutdown the guest system (not save the state, do a clean shutdown)
- Close VB Host System
- Installed old version (do not start after installation)
- Doubleclicked the extension pack -> VB will start and install the pack and will ask you if you want to keep the old version -> you sure want to do this
- After extension pack is installed restart VB (don't know if this is necessary, but I did)
- Start the guest system and install the guest extensions, the correct version will be installed
- Reboot the guest system and check, if the system is running better again
- If not, try to downgrade to the next older version

Hope this can help.

Well, to me that doesn't sound like a solid advice. I mean newer versions fix bugs. Sure they could introduce new ones, but that's not the norm. Would you mind posting a VBox.log (zipped)? With the guest shut down, right-click on the VM, show log. Zip it and attach it. Bonus if you do this for both versions, i.e. for 5.0.10 and 5.0.6. I realize that you have to do a couple of installs and uninstalls, but that's how users like you and me can contribute and make this a better product.

socratis wrote:Well, to me that doesn't sound like a solid advice. I mean newer versions fix bugs. Sure they could introduce new ones, but that's not the norm. Would you mind posting a VBox.log (zipped)? With the guest shut down, right-click on the VM, show log. Zip it and attach it. Bonus if you do this for both versions, i.e. for 5.0.10 and 5.0.6. I realize that you have to do a couple of installs and uninstalls, but that's how users like you and me can contribute and make this a better product.

Hi,

as I use the guest system for my finance software I am now satisfied that the system is running as good as before upgrading to 5.0.10.
So maybe if the next version (5.0.12?) will be released I will give it a try again. But not right now, I will stay with 5.0.6

You're right, my solution is not good for making the product better, but it helped me from being frustrated after the upgrade and gave me the opportunity to work with my system again.

FWIW, I launched my Windows 8.1 guest for the first time in a very long time to check on the OP's problem. Running VB 5.0.10 on an OSX host. It was extremely slow to open, run and shutdown. I updated the GA's to 5.0.10, restarted and nothing changed. Still very slow. I used CCleaner inside the guest to clean up the registry and restarted the guest. It is now fast again. Just food for thought.

loukingjr wrote:FWIW, I launched my Windows 8.1 guest for the first time in a very long time to check on the OP's problem.

You probably don't have much experience with recent Microsoft OSes With default settings, starting Windows 8.x/10 after a few weeks means the OS will be very very busy for quite a while downloading and installing updates, defragmenting disk, and doing all sorts of other things that would normally be run in little bits overnight. This is unfortunately normal.

Well, you're right, I don't but, I have automatic updates disabled in the 8.1 guest. I had no idea it defrags by itself. I do have Windows 10 guests on a Windows, Linux and OSX host since the insider preview and none of them were remotely as slow as the 8.1 guest. The 8.1 guest was never that slow for that matter. Beats me.

FWIW, the Windows 8.1 guest was created in june of 2014.