Altiris Software Virtualization Solution

I guess this one competes with Sandboxie, Bufferzone and Defencewall. Its free for personal use.
I have not yet tested it fully, just installed Firefox 2 beta 1 but it works well so far.
It is, initially, a bit harder (for me atleast) to comprehend than the above mentioned programs.
Maybe something for the interrested to look at?

http://www.altiris.com/Products/SoftwareVirtualizationSolution.aspx

 

I´ve now been testing this program for a couple of days. It wasnt that hard to understand after all. Installing an app is a breeze. You can dig deeper into SVS and configure it the way you want (thats when the learning curve gets a bit steep ) but it doesnt seem necessary for the average user. SVS is safe "out of the box" as far as I can see.
Once a program is installed you can choose to let it be active (called "activate layer" in SVS) by default or you can "wake" the program anytime you need it by activating it in the SVS interface. While inactive the program is like it is not installed at all. When you "activate" the program the desktop icon appears and you doubleklick it as any other program. While active it catches all the changes made by the program, but only in a virtual layer. When deactivating layer the changes are gone into sleep so to speak, well you catch the drift
When you are done with the program or if it for some reason messes up your system, you just delet the icon in the SVS interfase. All the files installed is gone and so is every thing in the registry (because they where never really written into the registry.)

The closest competitor looks like Sandboxie, but I like this one better. It seems more logical to me.

 

Sounds like an interesting program. You may want to read the PC Mag review.

Sandboxie can be used for security purposes (within its limits) but the review and Altiris state that this software is not meant as a security layer. However, it appears to be a good way to test software (but not security software) and can be installed on up to 10 computers for personal use.

 

Thanks for the link InfinityAz. Now I understand more of the program. It sems I misunderstood some of its functions and it can not be compared to the above mentioned programs. Cheers.

 

Also been looking at this. Theres a thread by Spanner over at broadband reports about SVS also :

http://www.dslreports.com/forum/remark,15752300?hilite=altiris

 

Has anyone any updates on this software - good - still using it etc.

 

I tried it once (months ago) and I didn´t like it, couldn´t really figure out how to use it, so IMO not that user friendly. And besides, I do not think you need it when you´re using Sandboxie, I mean it basically does the same thing right?

 

Thanks

I have tried out Greenborder and GesWall. They slowed everything to a crawl - think the latter was the worst.

Just tried Sandboxie. Seems to work but is slower, trouble is that it only allows you to use your default browser until you register so cannot see how it behaves with others. It's on my Wife's m/c and she uses different browser for different sites because they display better.

 

Yeah that´s true, I´m currently also not using any sandbox tools to protect my browser because of various reasons. But keep in mind, Altiris SVS was never meant to be a pure security tool, so you might want to check out other security solutions.

 

It's important to note that Altiris Software Virtualization is not a security application, but more for testing. It will capture the installation of a chosen application and write the whole installation to a single file. You can then use Altiris to launch that file to run the program just as though it were installed. Then when you shut the application down, it's nothing more than another file on your hard drive. It virtualizes any changes the program makes to your system and discards them when you close the application. This makes it so that if you have two applications that cannot be installed at the same time, say the current version of MS Office and the beta version of MS Office, then you can have them both on your system at the same time (although they still couldn't be used at the same time, and you have to be careful or it will discard any documents you created when you close the app). You can also move the virtualized program (called a "layer") to another system that has Altiris installed and run it there. This is great for testing because the program will not be able to affect your system in any permanent way, and you can create "layers" for as many apps as you want without worrying about conflicts. You will also then not need to uninstall and reinstall the program. It's not meant to be 100%, so you wouldn't want to count on it protecting you against malware, and you wouldn't want to virtualize any security software that you actually want to use.

 

Thanks for a very clear answer on this.