Sandboxie – Ultimate Malware Protection

This post was written by admin on July 9, 2008
Posted Under: Malware Protection, PC Security

Update February 2010 - Windows 7 and 64Bit compatibility released

As many of you will be aware, I normally only ever write an article about Freeware Programs and tools, but I am making an exception here, as this little program will give you more safety and security while surfing than any other piece of software, be it free or paid for and it is very affordable.

Let me point out that there is a free version and I am an affiliate for this program. It's one of the very few that I would recommend users upgrading to because of the protection it offers. I came across this program and decided to give it a try. I was so impressed with it and what it has to offer that I requested permission to write an article.

Sandboxie, quite simply is an amazing program that will banish all forms of malware from infecting your computer. This is one program that you simply cannot afford to miss out as it keeps your computer free from the daily onslaught of malware.

With normal surfing information is loaded from your hard drive and then through your browser where information is then written back to your computer, if it’s a malicious site then you will also have malware written to your drive, as well as registry entries being changed, programs being hijacked, BHO’s added etc. We all know the effects that a single piece of malware can have, to the point of searching for removal programs or at worst, losing vital documents, photo’s and even carrying out a format to start again.

Sandboxie creates a ‘virtual area’ in which you can run your browser, email reader, instant messengers and programs in complete safety. The information is loaded from your hard drive into the sandbox environment, from there the read/write operations are carried out within the sandbox environment and never back to your computer.

You can download programs, email attachments etc in total safety as each is still contained within the sandboxed environment. You can open atachments, run programs and scan for malware and if malware free you can then ‘recover’ them from inside the virtual safe area and save them to your computer quite safely. Should you find malware it is safely contained, and when you terminate programs, browsers, email readers etc within the sandbox, these disappear, as they appear to have never existed because they were in the ‘virtual’ area created by Sandboxie.

I did a normal day of surfing with my normal protection, when completed I ran CCleaner and removed 53.8MB of junk. I then did a similar day of surfing using Sandboxie, again I ran CCleaner and removed…..0.14MB of junk, and this was purely because I had been using Notepad and Yahoo Messenger outside the sandbox environment. Effectively, your surfing history gets wiped out when closing the sandbox, as it only existed within a virtual area and not on your hard drive.

What cost for such safety? You can use this program free for 30 days, and it remains free, but at the end of 30 days you will get a delay of 5 seconds before you can use the program which also requests that you license the program.

Try it for free, what have you got to lose? No spyware, adware, trojans or any other malicious content will download to your computer without YOU recovering it.

Now, for a lifetime license this will cost you less than $30 US Dollars, 22 Euros, £17.27 UK pounds, for other currency conversion rates click here to convert. The license will also allow you to run Sandboxie on any number of computers that you own for personal use and also allows you to open more than one sandbox at a time. So you could have one open for surfing, one for testing a new program, one for email and so on.

To be honest, this is remarkably good value and for those that purchase anti-virus, anti-malware programs with annual fees this is a much cheaper option with only ONE Lifetime payment, no annual fees whatsoever.

For the many who use any kind of security programs, it means less time scanning and weeding out the junk files and malware as it does not exist unless you specifically ‘recover’ it from the sandbox to your hard drive.