I realize this is a complicated problem to trace. My client is a busy business owner and his computer will sit for hours with a bunch of programs running, while he is out of the office managing his business. But I feel like this is common for many people. I tell people not to leave browsers open with a hundred tabs but no one listens, lol. But read on and you'll see this isn't a "normal" Windows crashing situation...
First, I wanted to create a couple of tests I could reproduce over and over in order to test any suggestions from this forum:
TEST 1:
No applications running in the host other than VirtualBox
- Windows 7 guest is running in full screen mode and has:
- Google Chrome running with 25 saved tabs (web sites commonly used by the client)
- (2) Microsoft Word documents open
- Windows Task Manager
- same as above but using Firefox instead of Google Chrome (the same web sites are used in 25 tabs)
- Both tests ran fine for at least 18 hours. All windows and tabs remained responsive. Good right?
- Google Chrome had twice as many processes as Firefox and used 73% of 8GB RAM, compared to 52% used by Firefox (same web sites in all tabs)
- I thought the culprit would be Chrome but both guest sessions became "unresponsive" between 26 and 30 hours from startup.
- I say "unresponsive" because I could still move the mouse around the screen, but I could not move, select, or close any windows.
- Windows Task Manager was in the "Performance" tab and all of the data was still updating and scrolling the graphs, CPU use was low and memory use was as stated earlier. Windows "looked" like it was still running, but I had no keyboard or mouse control (even though I could still move the mouse around the screen)
- Host key commands did not work and Ctrl-Alt-Del did not work.
thanks
