One of the best setups I've come up with so far is running a Win XP/7 installation as your main OS, and then running VirtualBox with a Linux Mint Installation. Linux is considerably more secure (and faster) than Windows and works great for simple things like browsing and typing documents. Their "Office" suite is compatible with all Microsoft Office documents so there's no issue there. The best part is, if you somehow get infected by someone's stupidity, just dump the virtual machine and start fresh. Of course, you can do your favorite Windows versions as well.
Storage permitting (I have 20 TB of storage on my server), I keep unmolested versions of Win 98, XP, 7, and Linux Virtual Machines in an archive folder. If things go south, I just delete the current Virtual Machine and copy the archive in its place. Takes 2 minutes and I have a fresh OS ready to go. As long as you don't map any drives to the Virtual Machine, it's pretty much completely isolated from your host machine and anything else on your network.
Another good OS for complete isolation is
Qubes OS. It is one of a few OS's used by Edward Snowden. It leaves no footprint, can be run from a thumbdrive, and is nearly impenetrable. This could be run as a virtual machine as well.
There are plenty of options for security, especially if you're willing to step outside of the Microsoft comfort zone.
__________________
Bill Cohron - The Mad Doctor
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Tue, February 2nd, 2021, 09:56 AM
Hybrid Mode
