Happy with limited virtualization

Every Windows user is familiar with the effects of bitrot – but answers to that problem are few.

My early attempts at using virtualization software (first post, followup) were disappointing to say the least and Windows’ own built-in “solution” System Restore, is a spectacular failure. The best answer right now is Virtual PC – but unless you are running a top of the line rig, it’s memory requirements are just too steep.

My own virtualization requirements are limited – I want to be able to quickly install and uninstall various demo applications and not bad dll files and registry entries infesting my PC like an invasion of roaches.

Sandboxie has proven to be just right for my needs. Once you install Sandboxie, any installed program can be run in a virtual environment – all writes to your hard drive, changes to the registry hive etc. are trapped in an intermediate layer. Once you are done, just choose the option “Delete contents of sandbox” and voila! everything is back to where it was before. Conveniently, Sandboxie adds an right-click option to all executables to “Run Sandboxed”, which is extremely convenient when running installer software ((Of course, some installer software just doesn’t work well with Sandboxie but then this is typical of any attempt to “clean-up” program installs in Windows – witness the difficulties of Windows Vista))

From a usability perspective – I am a little baffled by the fact that the “Sandboxie Explorer” and “Sandboxie Start Menu” cannot be accessed from the Sandboxie tray icon. Given that virtualized installs are only accessible from the Sandboxie Start Menu, this oversight gets very annoying, very quickly.

Despite that small niggle, I still believe that Sandboxie is the best light-weight virtualization software available for Windows right now, especially one that is freeware. Altiris SVS and System Restore have the right idea – the ability to create “states” or “layers” that one can rollback to at any time, but the implementation is too flawed to make them a compelling solution.

Scott Jones says:

August 30, 2007 at 2:10 am

More detail on why you feel “the implementation (of Altiris SVS) is too flawed to make (it) a compelling solution” would be very helpful.

Thanks,
Scott Jones
Product Manager, Altiris SVS

Balaji says:

August 30, 2007 at 10:43 pm

Hey Scott!

Thanks for stopping by. I had discussed the issues I had with Altiris SVS in an earlier post (linked in the article, but here it is). Broadly the issues are:

1. Inability to create different layers for different applications – My initial assumption was I could create one layer for every application I installed and then activate/deactivate all of them at one go. However, it turned out that only one layer could be active at a time and that defeated the purpose of virtualization as I saw it – being able to rollback one change/changes to a base install.

2. Startup – The version of Altiris I used would only run as part of my startup group. That meant that programs that added services (such as iTunes) or other programs in the startup group would fail till Altiris was running. I would have much rather seen preferred that Altiris run as a service, preferably one that launched very early in the boot to avoid any dependency issues.

The version I tried out also significantly slowed some apps (typically apps that opened ports) but that issue is probably not a stand-alone Altriris issue.

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