sharke
What is it about your online interwebby surfing that is potentially harming your host PC? 

+1
 
My DAW is online 24/7. I'm very careful about the sites I go to on that computer. Well, actually I'm very careful on all my machines. I interwebbie responsibly.
 

Have you considered a sandbox instead of a VM? Lots less work, and you do not need another OS license to install it if all you need is isolation for surfing.
 
http://ask-leo.com/whats_the_difference_between_a_sandbox_and_a_virtual_machine.html
 

sharke
What is it about your online interwebby surfing that is potentially harming your host PC? 

There is no such thing as "safe surfing."
http://arstechnica.com/se...wned-from-legit-sites/

Sandboxie sounds interesting.

Virtual machines?  Am I supposed to pretend that I have the newest, fastest machine?  
 
Actually, I do use virtual machines at work but I don't have anything to do with they're set-up.  

Throw the computer and monitor out the window.

 
That solves a lot of problems!
 

I'll have to check out the sandboxing (and I've got 12 GB of RAM in this PC because it IS everything you know).
 
As for the surfing, one of the worst PC infections I ever got was from one of my normal forums when some hacker had taken it over.  Only two members, the site owner and myself (a senior moderator there) got infected before we were able to shut the site down and get it going again from webhost backups.  I use a really good A/V (Eset), but I have a few reasons to either use multiple PC's or get the two (non-DAW) boxes I have now to do double-duty.

Hmm...  Looks like Sandboxie might be the way to go for internet surfing while using a virtual machine for my other purposes.
 
One neat trick is to create a VM just the way you want it then save the file (for VMware that would be the .vmdk file I believe).  Now all you need to do is COPY that file somewhere and add it to the VM software.  When you need to kill it, you can always make another copy of the original and be up and running in no time.  The HUGE gain here is that you don't need to install and configure an OS each time.

slartabartfast

sharke
What is it about your online interwebby surfing that is potentially harming your host PC? 

There is no such thing as "safe surfing."
http://arstechnica.com/se...wned-from-legit-sites/

Agree.

Many threats download undetected without user knowledge; no popups, no warning, no need to check terms of use. Over time the threat has gotten a lot worse and more frequent. Almost every month I'm cleaning out my wife's PC and it has the latest updated browsers, AV, Malwarebytes and Spybot programs. Oh well, after years of maintenance (PC) I'm quite use to clearing out the trash, it's like another chore around the house that needs to be done. 
 
 

>>Many threats download undetected without user knowledge;<<
 
They're called "updates"!