[Aliska]

Keep the Windows sand boxed, protected from harmful malware.

That's an excellent idea. How do you do that? I want it to work like my 2nd internal hard drive which is used for storage only. I suppose a virus could hop over if I save something infected off the web to it, but I NEVER load ANY apps on my 2nd internal hd.

I'm waiting to be able to afford Win 7 because the lady at apple thought it would be better than running all the XP updates since I got my pc in 2003. I hope it is compatible with my current Win only apps.

If I can button up the Win side of the Mac, I won't have to worry about AV, a bonus.

[dayglored]

>> Keep the Windows sand boxed, protected from harmful malware.

> That's an excellent idea. How do you do that?

The way I do it is by setting the Win guest VM's "network" settings to "Private network with host". That is, the VM sees a network, but the only other machine on it is the Mac. That way I can transfer files and whatnot, but without exposing the VM to the internet.

When I need to run Windows updates, I switch the setting to "NAT" so that the VM can see the internet during the update process. Then I switch it back to "Private".

Piece of cake. I'm using VMware Fusion on the Mac, BTW.