Another trojan/virus By JR (Read 1,743 times)

[JR]

Oct 26, 2012 21:22:41 GMT -6 @mauiboy said:

Unfortunately this is a sad and increasingly hard to avoid part of life on the internet There are a few things you can do to avoid it or minimise the impact.
Leaving aside the common ones like having a firewall and antivirus (as I wouldn't insult your intelligence, I know you already will all do this and granny doesn't like eggs) there is one particularly interesting approach that has served me well. I run a second version of windows within a virtual pc application. My main work desktop runs windows 7, when I want to go on the internet I open up "Microsoft Virtual PC" and select a operating system off the list (I have a few different ones on there for work but by and large you can run nearly anything that you could normally install on your pc like linux) and it then opens this within a window. I know it sounds a little confusing, but you basically have a computer within a computer, so should the 'little' computer get a virus you simply delete the image and restore from a backup which is as simple as cutting and pasting a file, and your main 'big' computer is unaffected. If I get time and people are interested I can post some pictures of it in action. There are other programs out there that can do a similar job, vmware make a free program that does this. It's basically just an extra level of protection but if you have an unused windows licence or can cope with linux \ want to play with linux it works a treat

Would love to see a demostration with pictures. I just upgraded my satellite internet service to the new GEN4 system and it's fast! Very nice!

JR

[scooterran]

JR , I just had my system upgraded to the new GEN system too. Works great and I'm happy, happy , happy. I would like to see a comput inside a comput too . Sounds too good to be true. Bring it on !

[mauiboy]

Sorry for the wait, busy week with halloween and kiddies school stuff on top of work. So here is what it looks like in action (apologies for the large file size, thats two monitors side by side). It may look a little weird because I have no icons on my desktop (I'm a freak like that lol, wish my desk were that tidy).


So what are you looking at. My actual computer (this is just one physical computer with two monitors plugged into it, not that they make a huge difference), is running windows 7. It has the green meadow grass background. In the left two thirds are two windows with the blue outlines. The left one of those is running windows 8, the middle one is running haiku (latest version of beos, basically a different operating system just like how windows 8 is different from 7) and on the right third is windows xp in the gray window with the triumph website running in it and the standard desktop background.
The left two are running on vmplayer, the right one on windows virtual pc, both programs do the same thing but slightly differently. When I want to play on the interwebs I just load either vmware's player or ms virtual pc and select the operating system image I want to use. I have already created these previously, its basically like starting a fresh pc install, you start with a blank file and install windows or whatever OS you like. So when I select it from the list it boots up in a window on my desktop, like watching your normal boot up process but happening inside a window on your desktop thats already booted up. You can then take control and use that just like any other computer, but it is 'sandboxed' or firewalled from your main machine. If it gets busted too bad you simply delete the file that is pretending to be the harddrive for that virtual machine and copy a backup and you are on the road again.

There are a shedload of tutorials out there for this on the interwebs that would explain it miles better than I can, but if anybody fancies trying it and has a fast machine its free to download vmware player and something like an ubuntu vm image and have a play