Womble,
Welcome to Macintosh!
Forget antivirus software. You don't need it, and it will only slow down your Mac. I've not used any antivirus in 24 years using Macs and have never had any problems. It's *still* not an issue. Don't waste your time and money.
Parallels is good, and I've always had good customer service from them.
Ripping DVDs makes more sense if you use
Handbrake, which means that you don't have to fight with encryption and you get away with using a lot less disk space. If you have a collection of mixed-region DVDs, it won't ask you to reset the region on your DVD drive all the time either. A typical DVD movie will take up around 1.2Gb, whereas ripping the whole DVD will take up around 4Gb. It also has settings for iPods, iPhones etc. You can use
VLC to watch them, or use an App like
Boxee as a media interface to access things with a bit more style.