Simple Fixes: Virtualbox heavy Disk and CPU usage

As I have mentioned before, I keep my /home folder on a separate partition. After many upgrades (and recently some downgrades) of Linux I've had serious issues with getting virtualbox to run properly. 

The Symptom: 

Whenever I started Virtualbox, the HDD activity was so high, that it took about 5 minutes to start the vm. No other application could be used at that time (on the host OS) as the whole system became extremely sluggish - even flipping to a console (ctrl-alt-f1) took about a minute or two. 

Where are you VMs? 

The first thing you need to do is find out where you VMs are. If you are not sure, open up the virtualbox application and naviagate to 'File>Virtual Media Manager'.

This will open a window listing all of the installed VMs. 

Select one of the VM's and you willl see at the bottom of the screen where it is. Make sure it's not in the '.Virtalbox' folder. If your VM's are in this folder, move them somewhere else.  In my case, they are located in in a folder called "Virtualbox VMs" in my home directory. 

The Fix:

• First make sure you don't have any VMs running!
• Navigate to your home folder
• Make sure your file manager is configured to show hidden files (in nautilus just use ctrl-h on you keyboard)
• find the .Virtualbox folder
• Delete the folder
• Run virtualbox - you will now notice your VMs are no longer visible 
• Click the 'Machine>Add' from the menu and navigate to your VMs. Add each of them. 
• Done. Now start Virtualbox and things should run normally now :)