ShadowUser Sandboxie Drive Vaccine et al

I am a newbie who has tried all of the above software and more.

What I find is that common to them all, once you have done your browsing or whatever you can "dump" the effects of your browsing and return to a relatively pristine state have possibly removed any nasties one has aquired.

From that point on my experience has been very varied. Sandboxie is a great little program, still work in progress and there is a very definite limit to the types of programs you can install sandboxed.

ShadowUser (DriveVaccine) does not have this limit, or I have not found a limit. BUT the concept of rebooting everytime to rmove the snapshot and or save data files is in my view very cumbersome and time consuming.

Does anyone know of a program like Sandboxie where rebooting is unnecessary but any program can be installed and then removed without trace ie embodying all the best features of Sandboxie and ShadowUser type programs without the hassle.

Thank you for your help


Terry

 

Hello,
If you wish to virtualize your OS on the system level, then only reboots will help. However, you can use virtualization as an application that runs in your OS. In other words, you can run an operating system inside an operating system.
Mrk

 

Thanks for that. Forgive my ignorance, but how does "running an operating system inside an operating system " work?

I mean by this a) is it complicated b) How do I achieve it? (Presumably there is some software to facilitate it if so what) c) Is it complicated to achieve? d) How does this method stack up against the ShadowUser method? e) What are the advantages?

Thank you in anticipation of your reply I appreciate I am asking a lot

Terry

 

Take VMWare for a trial.

A number of recent threads to look at, such as here.

 

Though i've only tested it a few times in Bufferzone, selecting 'Bufferzone Desktop' virtualizes the entire disk. To test again, i just installed a program while running in this mode. Then went into my 'D' partition, deleted a rar file and copied another file to my 'C' partition.
Exited 'Bufferzone Desktop', and the copied file was gone and the deleted file on the 'D' partition was back where it was. The installed program now had the red border around it and after emptying the Bufferzone, it was removed(empty folders remained - on purpose by Bufferzone to show removal).
All this was accomplished without rebooting though 2 extra processes that are created to achieve this mode - 'Explorer & Bufferzone GUI' will remain running in Bufferzone until reboot but have no affect on the normal mode operation.