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Disclaimer: I am a hardware/operating systems idiot, I'd love to learn but don't even know where to start.

I do all my software development on windows but like Ubuntu for browsing, chat, desktop management, etc. So I run Windows 7 in a virtualbox on Ubuntu 11.10 (originally installed via wubi).

I recently started on a brownfield java project, I am a total noob at java too so in the interest of minimizing new stuff to learn I created a new windows 7 vm and installed java, glassfish, and intellij IDE on there.

Within a few weeks I started having occasional blue screen of death crashes in the vm. When I reboot, the event log shows nothing that strikes me as odd. This got more and more frequent (during a deadline week too!) until I eventually rolled back to a very early snapshot (basically just the windows install) and reinstalled everything.

And guess what, I just had my first blue screen again.

Honestly, I don't even know where to go for help with this. Does anyone have any suggestions?

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Are you using the recommended amount of memory for the Win 7 guest? Does the guest have the "VB Guest Tools" installed? Does the host behave strangely at all when running the guest (Stutters, temp Freezes, etc.)? Is your VirtualBox at the latest version? If you have installed the EXT pack, is that also at the correct version? This stuff causes BSoD's with Win7 in my experience. – Tim Jan 4 at 18:56
@Tim I am using the max amount of memory I can give it before it complains (something like 5.1 gig on my 8gig system). Virtualbox version 4.1.2_ubuntu38459, Tools are 4.1.2r73507. Extension Pack 4.1.4r74291. What would you recommend I upgrade everything to? Also I remember I had some difficulty finding all versions of these thing (the auto-update link for vbox tools built into it started giving a 404 at one point) Is there one place where that is sorted out now? – George Mauer Jan 4 at 19:05
I suggest heading over to virtualbox.org and grabbing the latest .deb/.rpm/tarball and install from that. Also grab the appropriate EXT pack for that version. Looks like version 4.1.8 is the latest, and there is a matching EXT pack available as well. – Tim Jan 4 at 20:05
Going ok so far. Will report back. – George Mauer Jan 4 at 21:57
Good to hear! Copied the relevant part of our conversation to the answer. – Tim Jan 5 at 13:56
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I suggest heading over to virtualbox.org and grabbing the latest .deb/.rpm/tarball and install from that. Also grab the appropriate EXT pack for that version. Looks like version 4.1.8 is the latest, and there is a matching EXT pack available as well.

From past experience, Windows 7 can bomb out without a good explanation when running under VirtualBox, I have found in all of these cases that there was a minor update available, after installing the update, Windows 7 started playing nice again.

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