okay this is a very stupid question and i dont feel like looking it up-
is a virtual machine some computer simulator you download on your own pc and do whatever on it? and can viruses or whatever on the virtual machine forget up your actual computer?
It's not a "simulator"
You're actually running the operating system and any software running inside that operating system through a virtualization program running on your computer.
Your computer dedicates some CPU usage, some RAM, some hard drive space to contain the file system, everything, and you use it just the same way you would your normal pc: install whatever you want, etc. I used them once to multiclient on an MMO that had extremely strict detection and blocking of multiclienting. However, it didn't work for anything more than standing around doing nothing because graphics on VMs are extremely laggy
For the most part, no, malware can't spread from virtual machine to host machine. Some virtualization software does have optional add-ons, however, that create vulnerabilities, and if you put the virtual machine on the network, you'll still have the same possbility of network vulnerabilities to malware that utilizes network connections
