Title: A safe home banking environment
(see "virtual appliances" at www.vmware.com)
 
Description : diskless, booting from an image of a live CD.
Do home banking from a clean uncompromised system.

Instructions:
You must first install the free VMWARE player.It can open virtual machines, but you can't create new ones. There are some workarounds that you can find on the internet, if you would want to create new virtual machines.

Download an ISO image of a live CD.
A good example is KNOPPIX at http://www.knopper.net/knoppix .
Put the downloaded image into the folder "ISOPLAYER-windows" 

Rename it to image.iso .

Open Vmware-player.
Then choose "Open file", and browse to the "safe_home_banking256ram.vmx"
Depending on how much ram you have : if you have 1 gb of ram, you can choose the 512ram-version.



Power on the virtual appliance. 
Depending on your network configuration you have immediate access to the internet.
I always use NAT-translation.

Using the suspend/resume feature of VMware which is default in VMware Player the virtual appliance
can be started and stopped incredibly fast.

The "Live from Image" virtual appliance provides a safe environment for home banking.
You start an uncompromised system from the image of the Live CD.
Here you can access the web frontend of your bank and do the transactions you need to do.
When you power off the virtual appliance instead of resuming the next time you will start the same clean uncompromised system.

Enjoy.

If you want to try out another live-cd, then you remove the files "nvram", and "vmware-0.log", and you can start all over again.

Those who want to edit the .vmx-files, you can do so by changing their extension to .txt, and change the contents.
You might want to work with 1024ram.vmx when you have more than 2 gb ram.