Application Virtualization & Streaming

Sick of buggy or beta software screwing with your Windows install? Altiris SVS provides a free (for personal use) and nifty alternative to the software diet by letting you install software into protected layers which can be removed or restored with a single click. (It's like a thinly-sliced version of VMware.)

You may face problems when using the slipstream process to install Software Virtualization Solution in an XP Service Pack 3 environment. Have you tried? It ends up rolling back.

This only occurs in a slipstreamed XP Service Pack 3 installation.

Many people are worried about whether their antivirus, firewall and antispyware software will protect them against the viruses, trojans, keyloggers and spyware increasing more than ever in today's Internet.

Here's an easy way to drastically reduce the amount of malware getting onto your PC and totally stopping any chance they have of running at startup. I'm also talking about unknown malware that hasn't been identified yet.

Being able to capture applications or updates in a layer is the Holy Grail of the SVS SDK and, well, the reason people use SVS. Surprisingly, creating and capturing layers is one of the simplest things to do with the SDK, especially when compared to Export and Import. With the information presented in this article you should easily be able to implement these SVS features into any tool you're making.

The Holy Grail of potential SVS features for many of us is AutoCapture. The idea behind AutoCapture is that end users should be able to do what they (we) normally do -- like install every CD anyone hands them or download all kinds of crazy stuff from the Internet -- but ensure that this non-standard software stays isolated, so that it a) won't break the corporate standard apps and b) can be cleanly removed if needed.

By now if you've been following along with my article series you should be able to initialize SVS, perform common actions and Import and Export, so what next? A common task in SVS is to get a layer name from a GUID or vice-versa, which is where Layer Attributes come into play. But it's not just getting GUIDs, you can do a lot more with SVS Attributes such as the location of the redirect paths or if a layer is active or not.