A general question. After finally getting my XP on my Mac to recognize my CAC card reader and the card itself. I now need to worry about anti-virus. Maybe some of you more experienced people can help me. I'm currently using Norton antivirus for the Mac portion. I know there is a free trial antivirus for the Windows portion by Kapersky(?). My question is since XP is running as basically an app of Parallels is there an anti-virus that will cover both.
As far as I know, there is no anti-virus that would run on both - Mac side and the vitual machine side. Inside the virtual machine you can use Parallels Internet Security which is, yes, based on a Kaspersky anti-virus. Here you can check how to install it: http://kb.parallels.com/en/5669 One more note that could be useful. If your anti-virus on the Mac side scans files whenever they are changed, I would suggest to exclude Parallels virtual machine from scanning. Since this is a pretty big file, it would create slow downs whenever it is scanned.
I have installed it before. It seems to limit updates and I think it was the cause of my CAC card not working at one point. I don't seem to be framing my question very well. Inside the virtual machine is my Mac antivirus totally blind. I can open my current anti-virus and it sees a C drive for Windows just like it sees my Macintosh HD. I haven't scanned it at this time.
There are none that do both. I don't run antivirus on my Mac, since field reports are dubious at best and besides, most exploits these days are "zero day" exploits and virus software won't catch them anyway. The same might be said on the Windows side; but the threat is much worse there so maybe more caution is indicated. I happen to keep all of my XP data files in a shared folder and it gets backed up by Time Machine. I also keep a pristine copy of XP so if I ever decided I don't like what I am seeing on the existing one I just trash the whole thing and load in the pristine copy. This is one of the great advantages of VM's in my opinion. I have found antivirus software to bog down XP to an unacceptable degree--sometimes to a ridiculous degree. Therefore I run my VM on Parallels 4 without it. However if you are bound and determined, I recommend you look into an antivirus called Prevx 3.0. I run this on my XP installation VM on another machine running under Parallels 3. Comparing a variety of system operations--from restarting to launching apps, etc. Prevx seems to have no effect on system speed. It does use heuristics, and it is free. You only pay when it detects a problem and in that case, the price is about what you'd pay for an annual subscription to Kapersky, Norton, et.al. So why do I use it on that machine?
