Some Lagniappe for You
By Tiny Ruisch
la·gniappe (lnyp, ln-yp)
n. Chiefly Southern Louisiana & Mississippi
1. A small gift presented by a store owner to a customer with the customer’s purchase.
2. An extra or unexpected gift or benefit. Also called regionally boot.
Are you like me? Do you download a lot of programs, install them and then decide that you really don’t need them? If so you should really use virtualization software of some type. There are many efficient programs that do this. VirtualBox, Parallels and VMware just to name a few. There are also many quasi-virtualization programs. These are programs that run software in a “virtual box”. Examples of this type of software are Sandboxie, Bufferzone and DriveSentry. Many software security suites such as Avast, Norton, Comodo, etc. also include sandboxing utilities.
The ToolWiz TimeFreeze is a simple and small sandbox utility that lets you protect your Windows Operating System. The program creates a temporary cache file on your hard drive. All changes made to your computer while TimeFreeze protection is enabled are stored in this cache file. No changes are made directly your system, files, or folders.
After you install TimeFreeze you must restart your computer to allow the program to start its services. You can the activate TimeFreeze from the system tray, start menu or desktop icon if you have one. Simply select start TimeFreeze.
As you can see in the screenshot, there are only five options (check boxes) in the program.
1. Start Time Freeze automatically when Windows starts.
2. Enable Folder Exclusion when Time Freeze is ON.
3. Enable Password Protection for the control.
4. Show toolbar on your desktop.
5. Hide the tray icon.
I prefer not to start freezing with my system start. Instead I start it manually before I install a program for testing or do something that may be dangerous to my computer. If you add any folders or files to the exclusion folder, no changes will be made to them. Enabling password protection simply requires a password to start the program. I personally see no reason to do this.
You can stop TimeFreeze by clicking the stop button. When you do this a pop up screen appears with two options:
1. Turn off the protection and save all the changes. This will save any changes you made into your active system and then stop freezing. This may take several minutes.
2. Turn off the protection and drop all the changes. This will stop TimeFreeze and reboot you computer. Alternatively, you can click the your start button and reboot your computer.
CAUTION: TimeFreeze is a program useful for mainly for testing software without making changes to your computer. Although it may be helpful, it is not an anti-virus or anti-malware program.
TimeFreeze is free for personal use. It is a 2.8 MB download from many of the software download sites. I recommend you download from the ToolWiz website.
If you like the program, just tell everyone that you’ve got a SWLAPCUG extra, a bonus perk, a small gift, a present from the club: a little lagniappe.