In this day and age, you never know when you would encounter a malicious app or code snippet. You download a seemingly harmless program from the internet and it could end up making unwanted changes to your system or it might download some other malicious software on your PC. Similarly, many people get infected by malware when they visit some of the malicious websites. You can prevent the system wide damage done through these unwanted programs or malware by using the Shade Sandbox program developed by the Cybergenic corporation.
The Shade Sandbox is not very much different from the very popular Sandboxie software. It limits all the changes made to the registry and to the files by the protected programs to a special folder. This way the changes are not actually committed to the Windows system and can later be easily reversed.
After the installation, it asks you whether you want to protect or virtualize the installed web browsers. Even if you forget or ignore this step, you can easily protect web browsers and any other application later on. All you have to do is open the Cybergenic Security Center by double-clicking on the notification area icon, and drag-n-drop any of the shortcuts into the Cybergenic Security Center window.
This will add an “S” overlay to the protected shortcuts indicating that if those applications are launched via these shortcuts, they will be launched inside the Shade Sandbox. All the applications launched this way will have a purple colored border around them and will display the Shade icon instead of their own icons in the taskbar.
While Shade Sandbox is does not offer as many options as the popular Sandboxie software, it is free to use and works as expected in all the versions of Windows above Windows XP.
You can download Shade Sandbox for Windows from http://www.shadesandbox.com/.