Making one's own sandbox ???

What I am wanting is a way to make my own sandbox - call it XP as a guest under XP - and as a result to gain the ability to install a program I wish to just play around with - maybe copy it's installation into a more permanent location if it's good - and to be able to just close the 'sandbox' afterwards leaving all as it was.
(Naturally I would want to limit drive access outside of the sandboxed space thereby allowing my AV to watch over anything I put there.)

In my Linux PC I use VMWare Player to do this and it works very well with an XP guest.
BUT...I do really, mostly use my XP PC still, and haven't had much success in doing this with XP as the host system.

For the sake of my sanity I wish to omit VirtualBox from consideration for this.
(Been there - done that - had an awful time of it.)

Then (AFAIK...) that mainly leaves SBIE, VMWare Player, QEMU, and anything else I've not heard of yet.

My previous trials & comments in this:
I do think very highly of SBIE - and I also think that I seriously do not grasp how to use it very well; I do very badly with it and when I asked for help at it's own forum...that did not help.

VMWare Player is also very cool, and I must admit that I have not used it on XP yet, mainly because of the huge hassle that VBox was when I tried it - and of course they're no way the same thing, I was just too twitchy to do any more when I last tried doing this.

QEMU looks very interesting to me, and I tried it as well as QEMU Manager, but had a tough time with it as well.
I even looked around to see if there might be any good tutorials on how to set up and use it, but found nothing useful.

I will greatly appreciate any pointers to stuff I am ignorant of, and especially any really simplified tutorial or write-up showing how something like this may be done.

Thanks.

 

Your first step is to create a new sandbox and name it as you wish. For that, navigate to:Sandboxie control>Sandbox>Create new sandbox.

Then in Sandbox settings, set the sandbox not to delete on closing: Sandboxie control>The new sandbox that you created>Sandbox settings>Delete>Delete invocation and tick "Never remove this sandbox or delete its contents".

To run the programs that you install in the sandbox you can right click the Sandboxie control icon, hover the browser over the sandbox where you installed the program, click Run from Start menu, find the program that you installed sandboxed in one of the menus and click on it.

You can also create a Desktop shortcut for the program: Sandboxie control>Configure>Windows shell integration, click "Add shortcut icon", choose the sandbox where the program is installed, find the program in one of the menus and when you click on it, a shortcut for that program will appear in your desktop.

About the antivirus, you dont have to do anything. It will regard the Sandboxie folder as it does any other folder. Enjoy Sandboxie.

Bo

 

Thank You Bo Elam.
I have spent some time trying to use Sandboxie and as I mentioned - somehow it's operation eludes me and it's documentation did not help either.

Truly I wish to try something else as I described in the OP and will very much appreciate info pointing to other things than SBIE and/or Vbox.

Thanks.

 

smallhagrid, if you follow the instructions, you ll be able to do what you want. For example, right now, I am trying a browser sandboxed that I installed in a sandbox. I wont keep it but I am playing with it now.

If you want an alternative to Sandboxie, I guess you can look at Buffer Zone but I have never used it so I cant recommend it.

I recommend you follow my instructions (only once), and you ll get it done. It works perfectly. Most programs install and work sandboxed just fine other than programs that install services or drivers. Those wont install sandboxed.

Cheers

Bo

 

Thank You Bo Elam.
I have a very carefully configured & very clean PC which I keep that way very deliberately.
NOTHING - and I seriously mean nothing at all - gets to use the C drive; but=> when I spent time trying to use Sandboxie it always did no matter what I tried.

Also, my various programs use other partitions for their installed locations and/or data.
I specifically wanted SBIE to be restricted to just a certain drive letter's use, and could not make that happen.

I did also try BufferZone, but it was really horribly buggy and crashy.

I may try SBIE again, following your instructions...and still wish to hear of other options if anyone has good suggestions besides.

Thanks.

 

In case you try Sandboxie again, you can set the location of the Sandbox/Container folder to be located in a drive other than C drive. Sandboxie control>Sandbox>Set container folder. But I think you still need to install Sandboxie in C drive.

http://www.sandboxie.com/index.php?SandboxMenu#container

Bo