I’ve been tinkering off-and-on for a while to get my VirtualBox Windows 7 guest resolution auto-resize working. While not mission-critical, it smooths my workflow, and perhaps most importantly, it bugged the heck out of me when it wasn’t working.
The problem was that when I’d resize the guest’s window (or, more specifically, when I shuffled windows in xmonad), it would revert the resolution to 640×480. Some tinkering revealed that auto-resize behaved properly up to a certain window height, then would revert to 640×480.
Some things I tried, which didn’t work (googling shows this is a common problem):
- Increase video RAM.
- Install (experimental) 3d acceleration guest additions feature.
- Set global max UI size to “any”.
But, I believe the thing that worked for me was (in the guest):
- Right-click the desktop, select “Screen resolution”.
- Click “Advanced Settings” (on right, middle of screen).
- Click “Monitor” tab.
- Uncheck “Hide modes that this monitor cannot display”.
- Click “OK”.
I tried changing the resolution to 1920 x 1440 (though fullscreen for me is 1900 x 1200, I didn’t see this option). The guest screen seemed to virtually flicker a bit, until I changed the window size, at which point it auto-resized as it should.