VirtualBox and guest internet (Lau?)

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Hello to all the helpful denizens of Comp, math, sci, tech.

I'm helping my sister virtualbox XP on her Macbook sometime soon (she wants to run Office 2007 and possibly a couple other Windows-only programs) and didn't want to worry about the security issues that Windows normally entails. She has only 1 GB of RAM, so I didn't want to clutter it up with AV software and the like. I know Lau has mentioned a possibility of setting up VirtualBox such that the guest does not connect to the internet, does anyone know how specifically to do that? She'll probably be running in seamless mode most of the time, and I plan to warn her never to use the internet through XP, but just to be sure... any hints?

Have you downloaded virtualbox yet?

I dunno. My instincts tell me that if you're running an emulator (right?), then most viruses attack operating systems, especially essential files. SInce the MAC OS probably doesn't have these files, you might be ok...

I've downloaded Virtualbox and installed XP on my OS X partition (on my own computer) to test it out so I know I can install it properly. No problem, but XP still has internet access, and I would prefer to avoid that. Since XP is in VB, any security breaches will only hurt XP, but I would rather not have those issues either.

All the program does is create a virtual partition for the program to use of any size you define. The way virtualbox looks at the computer may not utilise ALL of the functionality of it. Some of these can allow access to other parts of the computer such as modem, CD/DVD drive, other drives and partitions, etc. Just be careful about what the settings are

You're taking a unnecessarily long route. If you want to run Office, you could most likely get it running under Wine. http://winehq.org/

Even so, I have no idea why you'd even WANT Office 2007 when OpenOffice does EXACTLY the same thing. http://openoffice.org/

I use OpenOffice and I'm fine with it. This is for my sister, who runs Mac OS X v10.4 and wants to have the Windows version of Office, along with the capability of running some other random Windows apps that may come up. I just want to help her avoid Windows security problems.

Does Wine Compile on X86 Mac Hosts?

In theory, yes. But it would involve some hacking that I'm not prepared for just yet, and would be an imperfect solution as my sister is likely to want the occasional other Windows app that may or may not run in Wine. And she's not going to have the patience to troubleshoot her computer, or learn how to hack Darwin. I'd much rather cut off XP's internet connection.

Why not use the mac version of office?

I believe in the settings there a section for network, you can probably disable it from there. Or you can go to the General section, hit the advanced tab, and uncheck the network option in the boot order thing. That would be my guess

I believe in Windows you can keep it from automatically connecting to internet.

Wait wait WTF! Wine ONLY compiles on X86 Macs! It only interpret system calls, it doesn't rebuild the binary or something!

The Mac version of Office is crippled. It only includes Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, lacks the nice Ribbon interface, and is much less feature-rich than the Windows version. I personally use OpenOffice because it has everything I need and I prefer open-source whenever possible, but in reality Microsoft Office 2007 for Windows is the best office suite in existence.

one can argue that point for ever

from memory Virtual Box was a pain in the arse to get the network to work

Thank you Dokken for your helpfulness. I'll do that, and also warn my sister not to ever let XP touch the internet, just in case. I don't plan on installing antivirus or other security software on this, so I need to keep it away from the big scary Internet.

Odd, for me VB has always gotten perfect networking out of the box.

Must be a Mac specific thing, is not as simple as setting the Virtual Network Interface to none?