Silly question time - I am a new user of

M

MacUserFor20yrs

Bit poster
virtual machines. I am running Win XP Home on Parallels software (which is just perfect for what I need, thanks).

Do I need an Anti Virus product while I am using the Guest OS? The Mac is protected.

Please advise, thanks
 
Yes. The guest OS really is a windows installation. Although it's a virtual machine running with OS X as a host operating system it *IS* windows. Hence it can get viruses and spyware and trojans, etc, etc, etc, just as if you were dual booting into windows running natively on your mac or just as if you were running windows installed as the OS on a PC.

It's the bummer about windows - my current NAV definition file has 72,267 entries! :eek: And that's not considering spyware and certain other types of malware.
 
Win XP AV software

That's great (well under the circumstances anyway), thanks for coming back to me so quickly.

Can you reccommend any software?
 
Personally I'm using norton antivirus but I'm sure others can recommend alternatives. There should be some free antivirus programs for windows but as I have no experience with any, I can't recommend any other programs.
 
Actually the answer to this depends upon what you do in the guest OS. If you never open internet explorer and you never open email the chances of getting a virus in your Guest OS go down significantly. They don't go away but just it is MUCH harder to get one.

If you transfer files and you are unsure of the origination of the file then yes by all means a virus tool is required.

I do not intend to install one simply because I plan to use Parallels with WinXP ONLY to compile and work on windows software I create. Yes there is still a chance I could get something from a file I move into their but I can check it using other offline tools.

I'd rather I have my VM running light and fast for my purpose.

M
 
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