New virtualization product offers convenient & safe surfing

Virtualization products like VMWare and Virtual PC offer safe surfing but are inconvenient to use as they can take several minutes to start up. MojoPac is new virtualization solution that starts up really quickly. In fact, on my PC I could start MojoPac and have a virtualized copy of Firefox running in about 10 seconds.

MojoPac works by creating a virtual PC environment on an external USB 2 drive. This can be a Flash drive, a hard disk drive or even your iPod.

When installed on the external drive, MojoPac creates what appears to be a clean version of Windows XP running on the external drive. It's only an illusion as it actually utilizes the Windows files on the PC to which the external drive is attached.

MojoPac itself doesn't take up much space however programs installed on the virtual PC reside on the external USB drive. This means that if you intend to install large applications like MS Office you will need enough space on the external drive to accommodate the application and its work area.

MojoPac allows you to move some application data directly to the external PC. For example, I was able to move in a few seconds my whole Firefox profile including all installed extensions. Your Outlook PST file can be moved similarly.

Now for the really clever feature of MojoPac. Once you've installed it and your applications onto an external drive, you can plug the external drive into any Windows XP computer and bring up the same virtual PC complete with all your data and applications.

That means you can take your computing environment with you wherever you go, like a poor man's laptop. Plug your USB drive into a friend's computer, an internet cafe machine, a hotel PC and you are away.

Some folks will find this feature alone sufficiently compelling to fork out $30 for MojoPac. However, to me there's another reason that's just as compelling.

I've been running MojoPac on a fast 7200RPM USB drive attached to my desktop PC. If I leave MojoPac running, I can switch between the MojoPac and my normal desktop environment in seconds. While in the MojoPac environment my real PC is almost fully isolated. That means any infections in the MojoPac PC can be contained and isolated.

This gives me freedom to surf anywhere on the net with near perfect safety yet at the same time not suffer a time penalty in switching from one environment to the other.

Of course you can achieve a similar result by using a sandboxing product and if you don't need the portability provided by MojoPac, sandboxing may indeed be a more secure option.

Using a fast external drive I found MojoPac's performance to be excellent. Sure it was slower than my normal PC environment but not so slow as to be annoying. This may change if you use a low performance drive. Some Flash drives are actually very slow so using one of these could be a real problem.

I guess the ideal solution would be to use an external 7200RPM 2.5 inch laptop drive in an external USB 2 enclosure. This would offer high performance yet be small enough to slip into your shirt pocket.

Whatever drive you use, make sure you follow the instructions on the MojoPac website to optimize USB drive performance; it makes a huge difference.

In short, a terrific product that will meet the needs of many computer users. Many thanks to Keith C. for the suggestion.

http://www.mojopac.com/ Shareware, $29.95, 30 day trial, Windows XP or MCE, 9.25MB