Use a virtual machine -- it's free!

I've used virtual PC before, its good but its counterpart is much better so I decided to switch to VMWare.

I downloaded one of these "Virtual Machines" a while ago. It's still sat on my XP desktop because i'm too scared to open it in case it screws my rig up! hee hee.

Virtualization has been out for years and we are talking about it like it's new. There is no way that virtualization is practical for the home user. Stay off of the porn sites, run a good antivirus, and only download from a trusted source....problem solved. those 3 steps are much less cumbersome than configuring a virtual machine just to be negligent on the computer.

I think thats why virtual machines actually exist ya know....because for most "Bucks", staying away from the "Gentleman's entertainment" is practically impossible.

I am a woman and I can't understand the allure of porn, but unfortunately, I am asked to fix other people's computer problems and some of the men seem to like porn. I want to be able to tell them what they shouldn't be doing on the internet so that I won't have to fix any more problems. I would tell them not to visit porn sites, but I think that would do no good.

How is it these sites infect computers? Obviously somehow a file gets downloaded, but how - is the user clicking on something they shouldn't?

I never get malware on my computer but I never use Facebook, AOL or visit porn sites, either.

Because porn site get alot of traffic from "needy" people, so planting malware and other stuff there is a perfect place. Ive seen malware on a mate's computer in the past, that he got from watching porn videos. Just "click" and then media player opens, and then BAM, infected.

But people don't have to download anything obviously for nastys to get inside a computer, some come down automaticly (through cookies mainly).

Ok, so then maybe I should configure the browser to require a prompt before any cookies are downloaded.

Yeah, you can do that, and put some desent anti-spyware on, that's what keeps me fresh from the cookie monsters.

But back to the topic, i suppose if you were into using virtual machines, it wouldn't really matter if you got infected because you can just start all over again. Like i said before though, i haven't got into them personally yet.

Yeah, they do sound fun i suppose (and practical)...I'm just like a little kid on the big diving board when it's comes to VM, i want to try them, but i'm a little bit nervy for some reason.

Maybe i'll drag an old drive out after crimbo and finally "test the water".

PS: Benny26 is way too formal...You can call me just Benny ya'know

Just to add some information, from a few virtualization software targetting individual (not for enterprise environment) only VMWare Workstation (commercial) and VirtualBox (free - actually mixed license) that support this. If you are a user of VMWare Player (free) you have to have a clean copy of the whole machine stored somewhere to be able to revert to "clean" state.

I don't know with VirtualPC, since I never use it more than download the installer

VM is awesome. Once I discovered this I set up three machines. WinXP, Win7 and Ubuntu. I have three monitors and maximized each on separate screens and showed my friends. They were so confused that I did not have three PCs under my desk! LOL

Reading a few older posts I stopped at this one.

Why is this not practical for home user? I think it's most practical actually. These days you can get viruses, spyware, malware from sites like facebook.com and myspace.com. Users dont have to click on anything to get infected, like other's stated.

I think it's much more difficult to trust a website than to install a program such as VMware or Virtual Machine and a VM OS.

I agree. I usually run a 64 bit system. I think the last reason, silly as it may be, that I created a VM was to play an old game called Chips Challenge, this came with a version of windows that I cannot remember... but I found the download and it will only run on 32 bit systems. So I just quickly installed WinXP to play this silly game, and that was the only reason I used it.

At where I work, we run most of our servers in a VM environment, and we use VMware Vsphere Client. This is some pretty cool VM stuff going on here. Some servers required a USB key to be plugged in at all times, and well... these computers do not have a "physical box" to plug it into. So we found a device that connects via Ethernet, and emulates the USB in the VM through a software interface on the server, and it works like a champ.

Only reason why I bring that up is because we were talking about how we never had any problems with it. Its a Belkin device, if anyone is interested I can look up the model. Just send me a PM.

No point to my post, just talking about how VMs are nice, features, and how to get around the lack of a physical box when you need to plug a USB device into it at all times.

I didn't see any references to Windows 7. Does this only work with XP? How about W7 64 bit?

https://www.virtualbox.org/

you can also use virtualbox which is Open source and best of all it's FREE.

I installed XP in VMWare Player (Free) largely to continue using some excellent older programs which won't run on my Windows 7 computer. The XP OS came from a now scrapped computer which had a retail version of XP Home. Note that you can't use a cheaper OEM copy of Windows. It's worked out really well. The only glitch was that my paid for security software slowed things down. After installing Windows Security Essentials instead all is running well. I've added Ubuntu Linux 12.04 to see what Linux has to offer and have been impressed. Ubuntu Linux doesn't run as fast as my virtual XP and isn't up to playing video files full screen. Nevertheless it's interesting to experiment within a safe environment. Ubuntu Linux has lots of free software available developed by enthusiasts. If VMPlayer goes pear shaped it should have no effect on the host OS.