Sandboxie is a very useful program which runs your programs inside a special protective isolation area called a sandbox. Programs running inside the sandbox are not allowed to make changes or harm your computer. For example, when we run a program inside Sandboxie and it makes changes to the Windows Registry, those changes are not actually made to the Registry. Similarly, if a program creates or deletes files from the file system, it does not actually make changes to the file system.
You can make a program run inside a sandbox by right-clicking on it and selecting Run Sandboxed. But you can also create a shortcut to a program so that when double-click it on it, the program always runs inside the sandbox. Here is how :
In the following example, we will create a shortcut to Windows Notepad to always start it inside the default sandbox of Sandboxie. You can similarly create shortcuts to any program you want. You must have already installed Sandboxie before you can proceed.
- Right-click anywhere on your desktop and select New → Shortcut as shown,
- In the location field type %programfiles%\Sandboxie\start.exe followed by a space and the full path of the target program. The full path of Windows Notepad is %windir%\notepad.exe, so we will type the following in the location field :
%programfiles%\Sandboxie\start.exe %windir%\notepad.exe
If the path of the target program contains any space, then enclose the path inside double-quotes. Click Next to continue.
- Type the name of the shortcut like Sandboxed Notepad. Then click Finish to create the shortcut.
- Now you can see the sandboxed shortcut on your desktop. Double clicking on it will run Windows Notepad inside the default sandbox of Sandboxie.
This is how we can quickly make any program run inside Sandboxie through a special shortcut. But we can also right-click on that program’s regular shortcut and choose to run it inside Sandboxie.