Sandboxie

Sandboxie is better for browsing or running a specific program. You don’t virtualize the whole system just the program and the files it needs to run and no reboot to get out of it. Sandboxie is a freeware application that you can use to run two instances of QuickTest Pro simultaneously. Sandboxie will create a virtual sandbox separated from the rest of the applications on your machine. Sandboxie is available free of charge. Sandboxie is free, but after the 1st 30 days, they ask,each time you open it, to consider supporting it. You then click the OK button and it continues to open.

One really great feature of Sandboxie is the quick sandboxing of your browser, which - aside from giving you a completely safe browsing session - lets you run a second instance of Firefox. Sandboxie is a great program to use with any app that you are going to connect to the Internet with. I will use Firefox sandboxed if I am going to be visiting unfamiliar sites or a site I have doubts about. SandboxIE is a clever little program that acts as a kind of miniature virtual machine. You tell SandboxIE which programs you’d like to run from inside that little virtual machine (the “sandbox”) and it handles the rest.

Sandboxie does not need to search for and identify each particular parasite in order to remove it. Sandboxie doesn’t need either the disabling, or blocking of functions available to Web sites through the browser. Instead, Sandboxie isolates and quarantines the outcome of whatever the Web site can do to your computer, comprising the installation of unsolicited software. Sandboxie reportedly reduced the number of malicious attempts to 6 and those were done outside the sandbox.

Sandboxie has originally been designed to increase the security of browsing with Internet Explorer, however it is just as effective with any other browser, and in fact, any other program. Sandboxie wraps a protection layer around the programs it supervises. Sandboxie lets you do this by setting up a sort of virtual hard drive that’s separated from the rest of your disk space. When you install or launch a program from within Sandboxie, anything you download will be written to the Sandbox. Sandboxie does have the option to restore files from the sandbox. What that means is that when you are done or if you just feel like restoring a file it will move it from the sandbox location to the original location on the hard drive.

Sandboxie allows you to run your browser, or any other program, so that all changes that result from the usage are kept in a sandbox environment, which can then be deleted later. This allows you to remove traces of your internet or PC activities, as well as reverse any changes to your Favorites, home page, registry and more. Sandboxie requires neither the disabling nor blocking of functions available to Web sites through the browser. Instead, Sandboxie isolates and quarantines the outcome of whatever the Web site may do to your computer, including the installation of unsolicited software.

Sandboxie is a superquick download (421K) and an easy install, supporting Windows 2000 and later Microsoft operating systems. It can be used to provide sandboxed protection (for files, disk devices, registry keys, processes, threads, driver objects, named pipes, mailbox objects, events, mutexs, semaphores, sections, and LPC ports) while running any program, including any Internet browser, command prompts, and Windows Explorer. Sandboxie is free so you really don’t have to look around for an alternative. If you find it makes your Web experience that much safer, you are encouraged to register the program for a small fee.