Windows 7: Virtual Machine Question

Hi, I was thinking about testing out anti-virus programs, and I was wondering: Is a virtual machine kinda like a sandbox? I mean, will any virus' harm me?

That depends on quite a number of things. You might like to read this;

VMware Communities: VMWare as a secure and leak resistant...

http://www.vmware.com/products/player/

Regards....Mike Connor

As long as you don't run any networking on the VM, you will be more or less safe. But you gotta find some way to get the virus and such onto the VM and that's somewhat hard to do without having access to the host machine.

With Virtualbox and VMWare, the USB passthough is possible, but it would be safest to 'encapsulate' your viruses inside iso cd images, and attach the iso as a virtual cd within the VM. Another safeguard may be to zip up the viruses/infected files with a password encoded zip, the way we used to send off our "in the wild" viruses to the antivirus companies.

Email could also be used as a vehicle for zipped attachments. You can always stop TCP/IP with the IPCONFIG /release, and restart with the /renew switch in the VM.

I would not feel safe using Windows VPC with it's integration features , or the Virtual machine additions etc of the other two enabled for sandbox work.

OK, I was just wondering, but if it's going to get complicated then I might just stick with looking at reviews