Make use of virtualisation

Wouldn’t it be great if, when your PC gets infected by a virus or other malware, you could just delete it or instantly reset it to the condition it was in when you first installed Windows?

Or if you could have several PCs running different operating systems at the same time for different purposes, but only using a single physical computer?

It may sound like an idle fantasy, but in fact it’s perfectly feasible to do this ­ – and much more –­ thanks to the technology of virtualisation. In this short ‘back to basics’ feature, we’re going to step back and look at the main points of how virtualisation works and, more importantly, how to use it.

The good news is that the software is totally free, and if you’re using Linux, so are the operating systems. So sit back and get ready for a tour around the fascinating world of virtual PCs.

What is a virtual PC?
Virtualisation can be a difficult idea to understand, but in essence what it does is use software to emulate all the physical hardware of an ordinary PC. It creates a ‘virtual PC’ that can then be used just like a real PC, running any operating system and applications that you wish. But the difference is that the virtual PC is running in a special protected environment on your existing Windows (or Mac or Linux) computer.

What this means is that your real PC can’t access anything ­ – software or hardware –­ on the virtual PC and vice versa. To all intents and purposes they’re two separate physical machines. Of course, the virtual PC is taking advantage of all the hardware your real PC has to offer, but the virtualisation software acts as a ‘translator’ and barrier so that the virtual PC has no direct access to the hardware.

In practice this means, for example, that a virtual PC could become infected by a virus but would not be able to infect your real PC. Or the virtual operating system could crash but your real OS would be unaffected.

How virtualisation works is not a topic we’re going to cover here, except to stress that it’s a robust, mature technology that’s been around for many decades in the world of mainframe computing. The increasing performance of PCs has, in the past few years, made it a practical option for the home user to take advantage of.