Free sandbox or virtual machine to open potentially dangerous file?

Is there a good free program that would allow me to open potentially dangerous files in a sandboxed or virtual environment? I thought Sandboxie did this but I was trying to walk my wife through the process over the phone and she kept trying to open a game sandboxed and never could. It kept giving errors about administrative rights. I remembered some virtual machine program that would let you safely open / install any program and even if it had malware, once you rebooted it would be as though you never installed the program.

I looked into VirtualBox but when reading about the product details it seemed to focus on the ability to run "Guest Operating Systems." I would like that for the new Windows 8 pre-release but my wife just screwed up her laptop with some hidden object game. (She's addicted to them.) She isn't that computer savvy and is pretty naive and falls for tricks most of us would see a mile away.

She usually opens a a game and doesn't turn it off until she is done so the limitation of not being able to save her progress would not be an issue. Due to the economy I have to live in another city most of the week to work and would really appreciate any recommended programs to help her protect her laptop and ease my mind.

Thanks!

 

I don't use RollBack Rx but other people swear by it. Basically it creates snapshots of the computer. Your wife could do anything to the computer and then just rollback to a previous point. This rolls back to exactly where you were and is not to be confused with system restore. It's not free. Cost's $69 but you can get a 25% discount with facebook.

http://www.horizondatasys.com/169614.ihtml Has a short video

http://www.rollbacksoftware.com/

 

Give this a shot + it's free. I've not used it, so no info from my end.
http://forums.majorgeeks.com/showthread.php?t=251770

Cheers..

 

That's right. I do remember Wondershare having a Time Freeze program.
I'll look into that one but what about Sandboxie and VirtualBox? I thought they could be used in the same fashion.

 

Can't say about Sandboxie, but virtual machines such as VirtualBox do have to have an OS installed before you can do anything at all with them.

 

Comodo Internet Security has a built-in sandbox.

 

That video is great! It sold me.

What a great yet unplanned example of how effective programs like that can be as he opened up a spam .txt file with a virus that disguises itself as a Windows malware alert.

I had to remove the same virus from my wife's computer a couple of years ago. He just had to reboot. Everyone should see that video, if not to understand sandboxing, to see what a great job those rogue malware viruses do at looking like legitimate alerts.

I made sure click the 'Thanks' button for Major Attitude in that post!!!