Nikhil Dev

You don’t need to be reminded yet again to keep your virus protection up-to-date or to be cautious about the software you download. But what if you’re not sure about the safety of a program you want to run or install? You can attempt a limited installation of any piece of suspect software by using a helpful feature of Windows XP. To safely launch a suspicious program or shortcut, right-click it and choose Run As . Note that in some cases, such as with a mysterious new Control Panel (.cpl) icon, you may need to hold the “Shift” key to see the right-click menu’s Run As option.

In the Run As dialog box, select Current user and make sure that the option Protect my computer and data from unauthorized program activity is checked . Then click OK.

When running in the ‘Protect my computer’ mode, the program is able to read Registry settings, but it cannot change them. In addition, if your hard disk is formatted with NTFS, the program won’t be able to alter any files associated with the current profile, including cookies, temporary Internet files, the desktop, and My Documents. Be aware, though, that while this option protects against a potentially harmful program running on your system, it also brings grief to many perfectly healthy applications that need to store settings or files in one of these locations. Consequently, you might want to reserve this trick for dubious applications or those whose origins are iffy or unknown.