A great way to protect yourself from viruses, malware, and spyware is to use a virtual machine to surf the Internet instead of your regular Windows PC. So what is a virtual machine? It’s essentially a full copy of Windows running inside another copy of Windows, the host.
Windows Hyper-V Virtual Machine Tutorial
The virtual version of Windows is just a big file and special software that runs on your Windows computer (virtualization software) acts as a fake computer so that Windows can run. Anything you do in the virtual machine will not affect your host operating system. So you can download 10 viruses into the virtual machine and your main operating system would be safe.
What’s nice about virtual machines is that you can reset them. So if you get a virus while browsing in the virtual machine, you can just reset the virtual machine to the default state when you first installed it and start over. It’s also a great way to increase your privacy, because you can easily erase everything you’ve done in a virtual machine.
Before we start, let’s talk about the requirements. There are many software virtualization tools like VMWare, Parallels, VirtualBox, etc., but I’m going to stick with Microsoft software only. For this to work, you’ll need two things:
