I’ve heard and seen on YouTube people running a virtual PC on their PC, that is separate from their hard drive, so they can do everything they normally could, without worrying about viruses and stuff. Some even download viruses onto the virtual environment to test antivirus programs, because they can just terminate the virtual PC and make a fresh one. Can someone explain how this works and how to set one up?
Try a google search for virtual PC, wikipedia will also probably have information on it.
It isn’t separate from your Hard Drive, that is impossible it has to be installed on a partition of your hard disk and everything generally stays within that virtual environment, but things can cross to the live system. There are different applications that can do this and they have different functionality, so it isn’t a simple question, so time to get googling.
You cold also check out the following link on this forum:
http://forum.avast.com/index.php?topic=19387.msg396419#msg396419