Ubuntu – Installing drivers for a windows 7 guest in virtualbox

Freezes are generally hard to debug because your system becomes unresponsive then. This is even more the case when the cause of this could be anywhere

• a problem of the host OS (Windows 7),
• the guest OS (Ubuntu 10.10),
• or from Virtual Box.

From your descriptions we can only guess what might be the cause. In your case the system slows down before freezing, indicating problems in memory management, or from applications that eat up the CPU power you gave your virtual environment.

In the Ubuntu guest you can find out if an application causes this by running top in a terminal (or if you prefer a GUI in System -> Administration -> System Monitor -> Processes) to list CPU and memory usage of individual processes.

Other valuable informations on problems, or error messages from applications can also be found in the .log files that can be viewed with System -> Administration -> Log File Viewer.

If you had suspicious findings there don't hesitate and edit your question to include these informations.

Sometimes it can help to increase the performance and stability of the guest OS with different settings (most can be done in the Virtual Box Manager GUI after a shut down of the guest OS):

• disable screensaver in the guest OS
• enable VT-x/AMD-V (if your host system can do this)
• regularly update Virtual Box to current stable version
• install Guest Additions
• disable 3D acceleration
• increase video memory
• allow more RAM
• but avoid to allow more than 50% of total system RAM
• use one CPU core only
• enable or disable Nested Paging
• try using another audio driver (or disable audio)

Settings in bold are recommended in any case. The other points are suggestions on what you can try out to improve the performance of your virtual Ubuntu.