Hi, I've only just bought a new mac having been using a PC and am running Parralels on it, I was just wondering, before I start downloading anything, what the risks are of viruses. I gather that viruses are a lot harder to come by on Mac OSX than on windows, so I assumed that if I'm going to download anything off the internet I should do it on Mac OSX and not Windows. If I did get a virus from running windows on parralels, could it corrupt my Mac OSX or would it be isolated to the Windows virtual computer on my mac? I'm pretty new to apple, so any help would be greatly appreciated. Cheers!
Most (almost all) of the viruses out there are written to run on Windows, so if you were to download an infected program without some form of virus protection, then you will corrupt your Windows installation. That's as far as it would get though, so worst case if you can't clean it, then you'd blow away your Windows VM and start over. It would not affect OS X. Same goes for spyware - if you visit a web site that causes your browser to download spyware, then your Windows installation would be affected. The kinds of crapware they put out there doesn't run under Mac OS X. -Z
Take a look at sandboxie: http://www.sandboxie.com/ This is what I use to isolate suspicious items on XP.
