Macbook running windows XP potential to viruses?

[Sniper78]

If you instaill windows xp on ur mac book and have parallels running and stuff. Can you get viruses since macs rarely viruses. Are you opening your macbook to the potential on a pc running xp on it?

 

[Eraserhead]

Yes, a Mac is as vulnerable as a PC when running Windows.

 

[AussieSusan]

If you instaill windows xp on ur mac book and have parallels running and stuff. Can you get viruses since macs rarely viruses. Are you opening your macbook to the potential on a pc running xp on it?

The Windows OS running inside Parallels certainly IS vulnerable. You should take all of the precautions that you would with any system running Windows.

Having said that, I don't think the OS X side of things is any more vulnerable. Unless the virus talks through the shared folders to the OS X directories and drops something there, I don't think there is any danger. Even then, the virus would have to be Mac-oriented which would be a risk to the Mac anyway.

I run Windows XP inside Parallels with full virus protection and never had any problems with either it or my Mac.

Susan

 

[Westside guy]

I don't think XP on Parallels is all that vulnerable to viruses and worms, at least out of the box. Your OS X firewall (you DO have it on, don't you?) will by default block access to the XP ports that might be vulnerable, and I'd think it's unlikely you're using XP to check your mail (or even browse the web much). So the likely attack vectors are just not there.

Boot Camp would be another matter - but it's still only a problem for the XP partition. XP can't write to HFS+ unless you've installed something like MacDrive.