Creating virtual machines for kids – a great idea !

Its very common to find situations where your kids installed programs in your computer that caused some kind of malfunction in your operating system or sometimes they will surf through web sites with adware, virus or malicious code.

So, how many times have you thought of buying your children their own computer and leave the main computer of the house untouched?

Well, there is a good alternative. With technologies like VMWare Player (free version!) you can use your hardware resources of only one machine to create other virtual machines, completely independent of each other. This works like a computer inside a computer, using the hard disk space and RAM that you define at the beginning of the installation (you can also change this parameters anytime you want).

This way, for the same physical computer, you are able to create several virtual computers, and you can have one different computer for each one of your children! This way they are able to install what they want in their own virtual machine, without causing any damage or changes in the configuration of the main operating system.

It is also very easy to create a backup! The virtual machine in your hard disk is a file. So if you create a backup of that file (for example, when you have just done a clean operating system installation with a few important programs installed) you are able to quickly replace a damaged virtual machine.