Dualbooting FFXI security?

[INDK67k]

first, please forgive me if this post is in the wrong forum or has been posted already.

I'm interested in dual booting my PC and I'm wondering if it would improve security as far as browsing and playing goes. The idea is; I would use 1 of the 2 OS's for browsing and whatnot, and the other strictly for FFXI. i would run both with protection obviously but im just curious as to how safe it would be.
thanks.

[fishstix]

Unless you encrypt the partition or hard drive, to make one OS/drive invisible to the other, you're not really adding much security. Well, I guess it depends, if your browsing OS is running linux, then that would help a bit. Although what my paranoid friend told me to do is to use a virtual machine software like VMware to create an OS within an OS. It'll act as 2 simultaneously running computers and I believe you can restrict harddrive access. Run windows as the base and then boot up VMware with linux installed when you want to browse the internet. The virtual machine is created on your harddrive as sorta a compressed file so your windows install can't access any file inside it without booting up VMware.

I think the only way you can then be infected is if there's a linux virus which can also cross platforms to windows and spread through your network. I don't really know much about virus/spyware, but are there many for Linux?

[INDK67k]

Awesome, thanks for the info. The vmware method seems pretty safe, if I was to dualboot i most likely would be browsing on linux and playing on vista, ill look into the vmware a bit more, thanks.

[virusiidx]

FFXI runs pretty good on Linux via Wine as long as you got a decent nvidia card. ATI drivers are still not up to par with nvidia drivers on linux, but that seems to be changing soon. I used to play FFXI in linux when I didn't feel like rebooting and it actually ran noticeably faster than in win7, but it kinda sucked not being able to use Windower. You can still configure it to run in a windowed mode via wine though.

Linux is also extremely secure virus wise, so that's one suggestion. I would recommend Ubuntu if you're not already familiar with Linux.