I didn’t like it because it kept popping up saying I need to back up, among other things the firewall is not that configurable (it’s almost just like the windows firewall with outbound protection tacked on). I go to uninstall it, and it has issues uninstalling - but magically removes itself. Except, it kept all the ports blocked on my computer and of course since the program was uninstalled I had no access to blocking/unblocking them - so I couldn’t use a lot of different programs. Eventually I had to do a system restore, back to when I had norton installed, and norton was totally screwed up by the system restore and took about 200 clicks of “ignore the fact that you can’t find ccsomething.exe” and about 20 cups of coffee.
Shouldn’t be that slower, at least pure virtualizers (VMWare, VirtualPC - supposing you’re not running VirtualPC for MAC ;)).
But keep in mind that malware may detect the presence of the virtual machine, and behave differently there. Or, one day, it might even be able to spread out of it.
I doubt that will happen or at least on a very small scale. Virtualization software isn’t that widely used as many might think, at least not at home (users).
Though i always remove and disable networking services and disable networking support when testing malware samples, though i found that host running a virtualpc (or any other similar software) gets protected by HTTP scanner (avast! Web Shield or NOD32 IMON). So if you download malware in virtual PC through browser, avast! will trigger warning on host system and intercepted malware even before it enters virtual environment. Almost like gateway that filters garbage out of the traffic
