A sandbox is a mechanism in computers that is used to isolate and quarantine unknown and untrusted applications and run them in this separated and secure environment.
Why do we do this?
Well, think of it this way. A man has a contagious disease. It's a disease he passes on to all those in his contact.Until he is well or until it is determined that his disease, in fact ,is not contagious, he is quarantined and kept in a room away from all the other people in the world. So every one is not infected with it.
Similarly if a file of unknown origin is presented to us, we don't know whether it is an infected file or a clean file. Just to be safe, we run it in a sandbox(there is software for this) so any harm the file causes does not spread and is contained within this little virtual partition in our hard disk.
Sandboxie is a software that is used to implement the sandbox process. It gives us an option to open files in a sandbox.
When a file is run with sandboxie,it is run in a virtual partition of the hard drive. When we end the application, any bad/infected files are contained within the sandbox and can be deleted.
An animation of the sandbox method is given below.
(image from www.sandboxie.com)
When you've downloaded and installed Sandboxie you can run anything in a sandbox by simply right clicking on it and selecting the Run Sandboxed option.
You can also clear your sandbox from time to time to clean up the dirt in the virtual partition.
When an application runs in a sandbox, you can see a small yellow icon in the bottom right part of your taskbar, where the volume control and internet connections etc are shown.
Right click on this to see various options.
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