Testing Windows [resolved]

Development Testing and Automation
1

I could swear that the Win10 VM here worked for me before but in the last few days all that happens when I start it in VirtualBox is it burns 100% CPU for an hour or more all while staying on the boot screen...

Does anyone have other VM sources they recommend?

https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/tools/vms/

2

Gah, just needed to update VirtualBox!

3

It's probably just pooped it's user specific tiledatalayer dataset - by symptoms I'd blame Win 10 itself, not the hypervisor choice. I've been having the same on KVM. Since Windows 10 is becoming a relevant enough of a platform for anything web again, I'll leave a hint at a remedy below:

Relevant symptoms:

  • Logging in takes very long
  • It takes a long time for the first autostart app to start
  • Task Bar and Start Menu are unresponsive until the silliness has passed
  • Task Manager will be unresponsive
  • You can view the desktop properties
  • Items on the desktop are responsive, but will not launch (will eventually launch, the messages do go through)

Try to create an another user or if this is your only user, just let it wait out (can be hours, leave it to login overnight) and run in an admin powershell:

Get-AppXPackage -AllUsers | Foreach {Add-AppxPackage -DisableDevelopmentMode -Register “$($_.InstallLocation)\AppXManifest.xml”}

This will 'resilver' all the ms app store apps (and unfortunately reinstall quite a chunk of them as well).

After that completes, play whack-a-mole with the user localdata tiledatalayer folder: queue up the deletion of the folder, shut down the tiledatalayer service, click delete before the service respawns.

C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\TileDataLayer

And no, of course you cannot do this from recovery mode or safe mode... :slight_smile:

After this you'll have to uninstall all the bloatware again from the programs and features page, but as a side effect bonus you'll not have the tiles in your start menu anymore.

2 Likes
4

Curiosity strikes: Do you run your Windows VMs with or without the Guest Additions? (You can insert the Guest Additions CD from the Devices menu.)

5

I hadn't on this one. But now that it runs I have that option!

6

"delete & reinstall VM"