As much as I’ve been enjoying 10, there is one issue, which is that I use a lot of VMs.  And I didn’t notice this until it was time to run updates on the Windows & Linux VMs.

As they went to reboot the system locked up hard.  Event viewer gave me this…

I tried updating one VM at a time… crash, updated my BIOS for the heck of it, crash.  Downgraded from Player 7 to 6.0.1 and crash. crash crash crash!

So I had to look to the user forums where more people seem to be greiving for their Pentium 3’s with 256MB of ram.  This issue was effects both Workstation & Player, as they have the same core tech. Since I’m cheap this hits Player 6 & 7.  I saw this buried at the bottom of the Workstation 11 release notes (workstation & player have the same core)

Shutting down a virtual machine on a host running Windows 10 Tech Preview can cause a blue screen.

If you have Workstation installed on a host that runs Windows 10 Tech Preview, occasionally when you shut down the guest operating system in a virtual machine, the host computer might restart unexpectedly. In this case, you see the following error code on a blue screen: DPC_WATCHDOG_VIOLATION. This issue can sometimes also occur with power-off and suspend operations.

Workaround: If a newer build of Windows 10 Tech Preview is available, try updating to the newest version.

Fantastic.

Unfortunately, a new full build isn’t expected until after the first of the year.

This will be the last new build of the year for Windows Insiders

So there is no workaround.

A’int that a kick in the head?

One crazy thing I’ve found is that MS-DOS & Novel Netware 3.12 work fine.  You can reboot/turn off/pause them without any issues.  But if you think about installing NT/2000/XP or Linux onto a MS-DOS VM something that it does to the virtual hardware sets it up for the same issue where a reboot or shutdown will cause 10 to lock up.