Perhaps most importantly, you cannot count on it benefiting from the security software that you might be running on the containing or host machine – your Windows 7 machine in this case. The fact that you’re running anti-malware tools in your Windows 7 machine actually means nothing to the Windows XP virtual machine. The anti- malware tools have no way to peek inside or secure the virtual machine. It’s still connected to your network and to the internet. XP, or any operating system you might run in a virtual machine doesn’t really benefit from being in a virtual machine in any significant way when it comes to security. Is it as risky as running XP natively? Well, yes and no, but mostly yes.Ī virtual machine is best thought of as a completely separate machine. So, what that means is that running XP in a virtual machine isn’t technically any less risky. (XP mode is really just a virtual machine.) It is in fact, one of the common recommendations for folks that have software such as you do, that can’t be run on anything after Windows XP, to use a virtual machine to be able to run Windows XP and that special software. I’m glad you asked, because I’m afraid that a number of people might be making some dangerous assumption about virtual machines and XP mode.
