Sandbox for Apps

Some of you may find this tool useful:
http://www.sandboxie.com/

It allows to install a virtual sandbox. It can redirect the File Writing operations of any program into a sandbox folder, so you'll see if some spaceinvader.exe would try to overwrite your firewall configuration etc.

This looks handy for installing those apps you usually delete 5min later, thx for the link.

What a fantastic little piece of software that is... thanks for the link!

Tanks for teh linky. :)

Yeah. That's briliant. Cheers!

Woof

Unfort. it requires Win2000 or XP. There is also "SurfinGuard" for Win98 and ME users, but other than Sandboxie that is a 300kB Download, SurfinGuard is a (more or less) complete Security Suite (somebody mentioned imcompatibility with McAfee Antivirus) of 8 Megabytes that contains a Sandbox as well.
Surfinguard has been Freeware for some time, but now most free downloads are removed and they offer a trial version of the shareware product.
The latest free release in beta state can be found here:
http://www.mindach.com/Clients/computer-repair/Software/
Tho it would be nice to register when it's useful.
Here's some info and help for SurfinGuard:
http://www.hackfix.org/software/configure/surf.html

That's cool.
It's the solution to my rant about games that put their crap all over my "My Documents" folder!

Great gem of a utility. Thanks for the link jfk.
Please support the guy who wrote this by registering.

Payment is (via Paypal) $20 (£11.77)

What I like about the sandbox is finding out all the crap IE records whilst you surf the net. You'll see that everything is traceable such as the links you visit (complete with time/date) and stuff you search for (in Google for example).
Check out:

\HarddiskVolume1\Documents and Settings\USER\Local Settings\History\History.IE5\index.dat

Its also great that I can now examine an email attachment safely without the risk of it hiding a little nasty which wants to bite my O/S.

If I run IE sandboxed it can't connect to the internet.

Maybe a firewall problem? I'll have a look ^^

[edit] Nope, nothing in help file says you need to alter your firewall, any ideas?

Are you sure it's a firewall? You cold disable it for a few seconds and see if it helps. Of course you should then reactivate the firewall and tell the author about the problem. However, some people had problems with IE too (seems like IE is kind of inconsistent)...

Maybe it's this:
http://sandboxie.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?t=170&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=15

Now what would really be interesting is a reverse version of this, by reverse I mean that you could have files and folders that could only be seen and executed within this type of environment, they remain invisible to the OS!

CCleaner is a nice app for clearing out crap like that, and much more, the amount of crap in my registry it cleaned is a godsend to my PC's startup time.