VMWare Fusion Windows XP viruses?

[willnellis]

Okay, so my friend lent me VMWare Fusion 2. And it works perfectly. But my mother, is concerned that it may receive Viruses. Is it likely that it will recieve viruses? I have a firewall and AVG Free Virus Protector on it.

 

[Phil A.]

Windows XP on fusion is no less susceptible to viruses than Windows XP on a PC - you need virus protection on it

BTW, what do you mean by your friend "lent" you Fusion?

 

[mac8867]

AVG Virus is a just fine to protect your virtual machine. Software piracy is illegal and takes food out of the mouths of the children of the people who develop it. VMWare fusion and Parallels both offer trial periods and student discounts. Please pay for your software.

 

[stuarthatto]

running Windows on a Mac, in a VM or in Bootcamp will still have the potential of getting a virus, and since you have borrowed software, I am guessing you will also probably visit sites that will likely infect you. I am not judging you, just observing a pattern of behaviour I have seen before.

The Mac OS wont get the virus, but Windows will if you dont have AV - AVG is ok, but I would usually recommend to run two AVs if possible.

 

[dyn]

AVG Virus is a just fine to protect your virtual machine.

No it isn't, AVG in a vm is utter crap because it will tear down the disk performance to such a state you can't pretty much do anything but sit in front of your Mac and wait. There are quite a lot of performance issues when running AVG in a vm, it is a big no no. Microsoft security essentials is a great scanner with a smaller footprint, it won't cause you such problems. I think nod32, Avira and Avast will do just fine as well.

AVG is ok, but I would usually recommend to run two AVs if possible.

Running 2 AV's is absolutely NOT recommended because it will cause an awful lot of problems. They will detect each other and do some nasty stuff. Simply run 1 AV and in case of an infection use other tools to scan to make sure the infection is gone. However, do NOT install and use 2 AV's unless you love crippling your vm.

 

[discofuel]

Avast and Malwarebytes is the ultimate combo. Both free too.

 

[mac8867]

I have zero issues running AVG. Have been for a couple years now. It has the advantage of passing RAS security access probes - which is required for most technology professionals to conduct their business.

 

[haravikk]

I've found Microsoft Security Essentials to be adequate for VM use, as it's very lightweight. Since you're running a VM, so long as you keep the important stuff backed up then you can always just nuke it or use VMWare's snapshot tools to grab a copy of a secure version of your VM that you can restore if need-be. Any anti-virus with more power to it can bog down a VM quite badly. The only real problem with MSE is that if you're on Windows 7, which seems to love asking you to re-activate it, then it spawns extra warnings, but then that's the Microsoft way of doing things 🙂

Now though I'm mostly using WINE, it's a pain to set-up and definitely not for the faint-hearted, but it runs a lot more programs, and generally a lot faster, is similarly "sandboxed" as a VM in that only your fake Windows drives can be damaged by malicious software, and if you use Mac anti-virus then it will protect the Windows folders with little fuss.