Just few days back we covered Returnil System Safe which provides a Sandbox kind of protection to your system including anti-virus capabilities. Today we will talk about Sandboxie which lets you install and run programs in a virtual sandbox environment by isolating them from the real computer and hence preventing them from making permanent changes to other programs and data in your computer.

How Sandbox works

FEATURES

  • Secure Web Browsing: Running your Web browser under the protection of Sandboxie means that all malicious software downloaded by the browser is trapped in the sandbox and can be discarded trivially.
  • Enhanced Privacy: Browsing history, cookies, and cached temporary files collected while Web browsing stay in the sandbox and don’t leak into Windows.
  • Secure E-mail: Viruses and other malicious software that might be hiding in your email can’t break out of the sandbox and can’t infect your real system.
  • Windows Stays Lean: Prevent wear-and-tear in Windows by installing software into an isolated sandbox

INSTALLATION AND FIRST RUN

Installation of the application is quite simple without any complicated configuration needed. When you run it for first time, it will detect applications like your Antivirus solution, Acrobat reader, Browser & many other applications, on your system and apply the compatibility settings for those applications to Sandboxie on its own.

USER INTERFACE AND WORKING

The user interface is too simple and this simplicity may confuse many users on how to use it. So in one way, this too simple interface can be bad for many users. Even though it creates a shortcut for “Sandboxed Web Browser” in sandbox on your desktop, you need to use the program interface to run any other application under sandbox.

SANDBOX APPLICATIONS

You need to just right-click on ” Default Sandbox” and then you will find options for running different applications including web browser, Windows explorer or any other applications along with other options like settings, recovery option, or exploring it plus few more.

Sandboxie applications running with options

Every application that runs inside sandbox environment is labeled as [#]———–[#] even inside the application and as the title of the running application. Also each sandboxed application is shown wrapped in a yellow rectangular box around it making it easy for you to distinguish them from normal applications.

SANDBOX FILES AND FOLDERS

Apart from applications, you can even use this application for sandboxing files and folders on your system.

Isolate files and folders

APPLICATION COMPTABILITY

You can run any application inside it by browsing for the application file and running it. If by default that application is not being added as compatible with Sandboxie, you can add them from the options window. You can add almost any application using this and the application will then run fine if it is not added or detected during the Sandboxie install. As you can see from the screenshot below, it has a big list of applications separated by categories.

Giveaway

Thanks to tzuk , we are giving away 7 License keys of Sandboxie to readers of Avinashtech. Just follow the simple rules below to enter in this draw.

  1. Subscribe to Avinashtech by entering your email address in the subscribe box on right sidebar of the blog or by clicking this link. Do remember to verify your email address when you get the verification email from Feedburner.
  2. Like the Facebook Fan Page of Avinashtech (If you don’t have a Facebook account you can skip this).
  3. Tell us using comments, why you would like to have a license for this application.
  4. Share this on Twitter, Facebook. (If you have an account there).