The Returnil Virtual System Premium Edition provides an altogether different and highly complimentary level of defense. It is designed to protect your computer from all types of software, downloads, websites or anything else that might harbor viruses, spyware and other malicious programs.
Returnil virtualization technology clones a computers System Partition and boots the PC into this system rather than native Windows, allowing you run your applications in a completely isolated environment. If the PC is attacked or gets infected, all you need to do is to simply reboot the PC to erase all changes. After reboot, the system will be restored to its original state, as if nothing ever happened.
Also available through my website: http://home.comcast.net/~mysharedfiles/
It’s a good program and made even better for this one day FREE download opportunity.
Actually if you go here http://www.returnilvirtualsystem.com/index.htm you can get Returnil Virtual System Personal Edition v2.0 free. No idea how much difference there is from the Premium Edition. I did download it and thinking of running it on a spare comp we have for a test.
Sounds very similar to software we used called DeepFreeze. Once rebooted all changes were erased. Worked very well for display machines that people would install random stuff on. http://www.faronics.com/html/deepfreeze.asp
I use this at our Senior Center on the one system that has unrestricted internet access.
That way I don’t have to worry about the safety of our older folks… ;D
I don’t really care which websites fascinates any of the seniors.
Let their mind become infected as long as the system I set up remains C L E A N ;D ;D
The free edition does not allow you to save downloads or documents to your “real” hard drive,from a virtual session…
With the Premium edition you can.
(you can save something by either drag and drop within the GUi,or you can enable a right click shell extension).
This is good,but it also opens the chance of defeating the entire purpose of
a virtual environment.
I really love the program,its trouble free,and you can set it to come out of the
virtual setting to allow any scheduled updates of other software to occur.
I am getting a little antsy to get the licence key that is supposed to be
emailed after New Years.
(I found the offer on Wilders on Dec 24th)
Yes thats a problem, once you reboot everythings gone.Also what if you accidently download a info/password stealing keylogger/trojan.Is it sitting on your system transmitting data until you reboot.Sandboxie imho is a much better program.With paid version (22 euro’s ) you can force programs/folders to be sandboxed.You can have multiple sandboxes to test programs,you can grant or block programs within the boxes internet access ( so you download a brand new virus,into a specific box, block all internet access from that box,run the virus for as long as you wish, while all the time your av is monitoring the boxes activities )You can set default box to auto delete on closure of browser.
Folks, I don’t know if this helps or not,but in addition to the member who posted his site as having the download,
there are at least two others.
It was on Give Away of the Day,and Ghacks.
The Give away of the day promo sends the download,and the key code in a Zipfile.
Ghacks directs you to the Returnil site,for the standard download,and to register for the Key.
The person with the screename ,Coldmoon,at Wilder’s,is a Returnil Staff person,and is a really
nice sort.
He is almost allways around or you can PM him.
He advises the codes are sent in small batch’s,but everyone will get one.
I’m late for the offer. I have been being quite busy and no time for browsing…
As for Sandboxie and Returnil, I think it depends on what you want. For example, if you’d like to connect to public LAN, turning on Returnil before connecting will protect your PC. Even if you are worried about data leaking, encrypting your data or securing it to USB memory beforehand would be a good idea, too. Sandboxie is definitely a good app and it is suitable for trusted environments such as your home network.
In that case, you may prefer using the hard disk for the virtual drive. For example, in my case, the machine I installed Returnil on it has got two giga memory. For XP, I thought the memory was enough but the machine became fairly unstable after I began to use Returnil. So, I uninstalled it and used the hard disk for virtual partition instead of the memory. After this, the machine became very stable.
Also, I have to mention that I accidentally put a file on the virtual drive, which ended up reinstalling of OS (Indeed, It took my time but I didn’t have important info on the system partition at all). So, I am using Returnil with hiding the virtual drive with Tweak UI. Not a single problem after this.
BTW, is anybody using Hotspot Shield? It’s handy but I wonder if I can trust the maker especially when it doesn’t tell me that it’s actually adware. I can avoid ads with Firefox but the maker definitely assume the users to be using IE. Before connecting to public LAN service, I can install Hotspot Shield with Returnil turned on, as I did so in my brief testing, but probably Returnil is enough.
