Monday SvenOnTech warned you of a tip that had you alter your My Documents folder in your Windows VM of Parallels Desktop to point to your Mac Documents folder. Today, we’ll give you a tip that will actually save you time and frustration in case your world of Windows comes crashing down due to trojans, viruses, and spyware.

One tricky thing with Windows is that if you’re infected with one of the above pests, you need to remove it before worse things happen to your system. Viruses for the most part are easy to remove and trojans can be a bit more difficult but can also be removed from you system for the most part. Spyware is a bit tougher with Browser Help Objects (BHO) or even worse if they are root kits. In many cases, a fresh install is the only safe way to insure you have a clean system. For PC owners, one back-up trick is to make an image of your system when its clean. Re-imaging a PC usually can bring a user back up an running in about 30 to 40 minutes to where they once were. It’s a smart trick that saves many time and money.

Mac users have a similar trick but instead of taking about a half an hour to be back in business, it’ll only take but a few seconds to be back in the VM game. The trick is much like the image one PC users do but the great thing is with Parallels Desktop, you don’t have to create an image as it’s already there. Found as an HDD extension, your image file will be found in the ~/Library/Parallels/ folder. In our case, we have ours in the ~/Library/Parallels/win98/ folder since we don’t have a need for the two or three programs that run only on XP with the added overhead of that operating system. So we made a copy of your win98.hdd file and left it the same directory. That’s it.

Now if we get zapped with a really bad Windows treat, we just shrug our shoulders and delete the win98.hdd and copy our backup to the same name. We restart Parallels Desktop and –bam!– we’re back in business. With this kind of ease, who needs protection? (Just kidding, we’d never recommend playing naked on the Internet.)

We’d recommend making back-up copies of your HDD file often so you at least have the most current version of your VM if things do go bad. It’s also good to keep at least one copy of your first install so you have a “sanitized” version of your install so you have a clean version of your VM in case gremlins sneak up on you with a VM that seemed fine a week ago.

Thanks Parallels for making it easy for us to re-image our VM nice and fast.

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3 Responses to “A Parallels Desktop Tip That Could Save You Hours of Headaches”

1. jc Says:
   July 5th, 2006 at 9:03

   Tell us something we don’t know for gods sake.

2. CH Says:
   July 5th, 2006 at 9:48

   This is a good tip. I’ve had to recreate my virtual disk at least three times, the last time being yesterday, thanks to spyware that none of the free spyware programmes could remove. They could detect it just fine but they couldn’t remove it. And get this, I rarely use Windows and hardly use it to browse on the internet but just the few minutes of browsing on the internet has caused me great problems.

   What I did differently than the previous two re-installations is the following:

   1. After (re)installing Windows, I immediately do Windows update and MADE SURE I did NOT browse to ANY other site. I allowed Windows to completely update itself include several restarts and multiple runs of updates.

   2. After that’s done, I installed the following anti-spyware and anti-virus software. All were free except the virus software which was available free to users at my university:
   a. Spybot Search & Destroy
   b. Spyware Blaster
   c. SpywareGuard
   d. Windows Defender Beta
   e. McAfee VirusScan

   3. I installed these programmes one at a time and updated them and performed the appropriate setting changes before proceeding to install the remaining software.

   I did a lot of research to determine which anti-spyware programmes to use and determined these were the best according to my research. You can do you own research and I think one of the best ways is to go to a reputable university’s website, type in “Spyware” and see how THEY tell their faculty and students to innoculate their computers against spyware. The sites I used were:
   a. University of California, Santa Cruz
   b. University of Calfiornia, Berkeley
   c. Carnegie Mellon University
   d. University of Illinois, Urbana-Champagne

   I hope this tip helps Mac users. It’s only since moving to an Intel Mac did I start using Windows and I can’t believe how quickly my computer (the VM side) became infected. As I say, I had to re-install 3 times and each time I became wiser. I hope this is the last time I have to do a complete re-installation.

   One last thing, after installing all those anti-spyware and anti-virus programmes, you might find that when installing your own software (in my case, Atlas.ti) might be a problem. It was for me so I ended up turning off all the anti-spyware programmes, installing Atlas.ti, then turning back on the anti-spyware programmes.

   I can’t believe why the majority of computer users put up with such a crappy OS system! At least the Mac is my primary OS.

3. Poopmaster Says:
   July 5th, 2006 at 19:25

   I hope that y’all realize what this is doing. It is reversing the age-old myth of the Mac being just a toy. Now Windows is contained in a nice little emulation box, along with whatever other OSes you choose, all as nice little toys to be discarded whenever they break or you get tired of them. The psychological impact of this is hugh.