Quote:
Originally Posted by newjerseymax
(Post 875549)
Hi guys,
I am working on my first VM and need to download OS image. I have read some horror stories on downloading OS from websites that have key loggers among other things pre-installed.
Where is safe place to load OS Image? Various OS?
Search and google just lands me in dangerous websites.
Thanks in advance!
If you want private please message me,
NJM
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The
http://mirror.corenoc.de/digitalrivercontent.net/ ISOs are as clean as what you get from Microsoft - but you don't have to take someone's word for it because if you look to the right of the page, you would find MD5 and SHA-1 values to check for data integrity. This meas if someone has altered even a byte, the integrity check will fail.
So when you download these, do make sure you download a free "free md5 sha1 verifier" and verify for integrity.
On another note, VMs can be a pain and I have recently / temporarily ditched them. Here are my reasons for user accounts and against VMs
VMs require a lot of time to install and setup.
User accounts is just a few clicks away
VMs will use up a lot of space
User accounts will be more forgiving.
VMs (Windows 7 for example) will need about 4GB memory per instance to operate smoothly. If you run 10 accounts concurrently, you would need an estimated 35GB memory, excluding the host OS. Expensive hardware!
User accounts will free up memory when logged off.
VMs are notoriously unstable and can crash just when you need it. Too many read/write to your hard drive will severely affect the drives's lifespan.
User accounts are more faithful and don't hurt your drive as much.
Your will have to deal with OS licensing issues x the number of VMs you have. Although this can be legally defeated without third party software or breaking any MS rules, it is still a time consuming process.
User accounts will not pose this problem.
Except you build VMs of different OS flavors, vary fonts and install a different screen (with varying resolution) that shows eBay significant difference between you stealth accounts, you are no more secure than using a user account.
If you use a VM with one screen, eBay can still see that it the same screen size across all your accounts.
If eBay decides to implement canvas fingerprinting, VMs using one screen will not pass the test.
If your OS images are duplicates, I presume your fonts will be as well. This makes it no different than a user account.
Perhaps someone here can convince me of some monumental difference a VM makes that also justifies the cost and time involved in setting it up.
Until such times, I'd just leave it alone.
There are minor tweaks that can be applied to user accounts to ensure security and speed but more importantly, to prevent mistakes.
