Sandboxing applications
The Windows Store is clever. It shuts its apps away in their own little capsules, protecting your computer from rogues, and from the influence of anything untoward that may be swimming around your OS. Most standard Windows apps, though, don’t have this facility. Unless, that is, you add it yourself. Sandboxie ( www.sandboxie.com) does exactly this. If you’ve grabbed something a bit sketchy and need to test it out without risk, you can install it within a sandbox to ensure it doesn’t get its tentacles in. Running a web browser on a family PC? Run it via Sandboxie to prevent your kids from downloading awful PC gremlins, or to stop your mom from inadvertently ‘upgrading’ something she shouldn’t. Nefarious threats such as CryptoLocker are completely negated by running a sandboxed browser, unless your mother somehow works out how to store her important documents within the sandboxed folder structure — that’s behaviour you need to curb on your own, though. Once you’ve set it up, you can open your sandboxes (through the app) as standard folders using Explorer.
Sandboxie can be used for free, though you get a nag screen after 30 days, and miss out on a few features only available to subscribers — if it’s something you use regularly, you can sign up for $20.95 per year. There’s a secondary benefit to all this, too: Sandboxie tucks all of the data from a program away in a single contiguous chunk of hard drive space, meaning deleting a sandboxed app doesn’t leave the same fragmented storage you might get after uninstalling a regular program. It’s a very minor thing, and there’s every chance you’re not even slightly worried by the behind-the-scenes goings-on of your data, but a well-organised drive is a fast drive.