Thursday 24th April 2008

Set up a secure browsing environment

Andrew Spode Miller shows you how to keep your PC free from web nasties by using a virtual Ubuntu Linux machine for browsing.

The Web is packed with viruses, trojans and malware, and even seasoned Internet users will eventually fall prey to one or the other. Thankfully, you can perform a neat trick using virtualisation that will shield you from the worst that the Web can throw at you. The process is simple and involves creating a virtual machine that runs Ubuntu Linux inside Windows, thereby creating a secure environment.

As the Linux machine is virtualised, it's separate from the host machine, so anything that goes wrong won't affect your main OS. Plus, if you don't like it, you can just delete the virtual hard drive image. The other bonus is that you get a complete installation of Ubuntu with which you can fiddle. If you fancy trying Linux but don't want to use it as your main OS, this is a great way to try it out. Once Ubuntu is installed, you can use Pidgin instead of MSN Messenger, which will also protect you from MSN viruses.

It's also worth remembering that the principles in this guide apply to many other operating systems you might want to try out in a virtual environment, and you can even run multiple virtual machines at the same time. To get started, all you need is a machine that can run both Windows and Linux simultaneously - a 3GHz Pentium 4 and 1GB of RAM or better should suffice, so you don't need a killer PC either. 


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