Safer Surfing and Testing

Whenever you install a new piece of software, or visit a web site you are not sure about there’s often a nagging doubt at the back of your mind; what if something goes wrong? Of course most of the time nothing untoward happens but if you really want to protect your PC form nasties or dodgy software take a look at Sandibox. It’s a clever freeware utility that creates software ‘sandbox’, basically a safe place for you to install and test new software, run existing programs, or surf the web and if something bad occurs it cannot affect your system, or damage files on your PC.

Sandibox is really simple to use, once installed open the Control window and use it to run any program installed or loaded on your PC, your browser for example. As far as you are concerned it operates normally but the sandbox prevents it from making any changes or downloading files onto your hard drive, so if you accidentally stray onto a site spiked with malware, you are protected. The same thing happens if you want to try out a new program, Sandibox allows it to install and run, but will not let it mess around with anything on your hard drive. The only point to watch out for is that if any programs running inside Sandibox create any data files – lets say you were using it to try out a word processor, or download files from the net – when you close it any documents you’ve written or downloaded will be lost, but it’s a small price to pay to protect your computer.

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