Scaling, VMs, HDR, 4K, Windows 10

[philehidiot]

This is getting frustrating. I have three monitors. Primary is 4K HDR scaled 200%, secondary is a portrait 1080P SDR scaled 100% and a tiny 7" touchscreen one scaled 100%.

I do things with VMs and I think Windows feels like it's in a hall of mirrors and falls over.

The situation is this:
Using Virtualbox.
Host OS = Windows 10 Home.
Main monitor running Linux Machine (Kali, but I don't think that matters)
Portrait monitor running two Windows 10 pro VMs which are both scaled so I can see...
Touchscreen often has Netflix or something on.

Each of the individual tasks running on these machines works fine, but when I have them all running together, it lands in a complete crash - black screen and no response. Usually when I'm right at the most crucial point having spent ages setting it all up.

I'm taking a wild guess that it's the combination of scaling, HDR, different resolutions and so on that is the issue. I will often move a browser from one screen to the other (host OS) and the title bar will be tiny, whilst the page content will be correctly scaled. This doesn't happen unless I have Windows 10 VMs open. Any other VMs (e.g. another Linux machine or even Windows 95) work just fine.

Any ideas?

[kalniel]

That's Windows for you.

I don't like Mac for many things, but they've sorted this kind of thing out no problem.

[philehidiot]

Yeh I have a Macbook Air which is ancient (and I'm keeping going as an up yours to Apple after they treated me badly) but running multiple VMs and switching between them / arranging them on multiple desktops is a dream in comparison.