112 PCWorld JULY 2019HERE’S HOW WINDOWS SANDBOX
HOW TO USE WINDOWS
SANDBOX
Sandbox appears as a small window on your
desktop. Within it, there’s another Windows
desktop, like what you might see if you
installed Windows 10 and decided to use a
local account.
The Sandbox virtual PC isn’t quite like
your own. For one thing, none of the
personalization options you’ve installed
(go.pcworld.com/prsn) will carry over, such
as favorites and themes. And that’s good!
One of the ideas behind Sandbox is not to
put your personal information out into the
wild, so don’t be tempted to log in with
your personal account. None of your
third-party software will appear either. You
still have access to File Explorer, but it’s
restricted to the Sandbox, with a subset ofThe Windows Sandbox splash screen. You’ll see this for several seconds each time you launch Sandbox.
An empty Sandbox window consumed about 1.2GB of memory in our tests running on a first-generation
Surface Laptop, so you may be able to leave a Sandbox window open.your PC’s resources available. Note, too,
that only one instance of Windows Sandbox
is allowed at a time.
You’ll probably be immediately tempted
to open Windows Sandbox as a full-screen
app. That’s fine, especially as Microsoft has
helpfully placed a large, Windows XP-style
header at the top of the window, reminding
you that you’re working within Sandbox. Pay
attention to it—the last thing you want to do
is carelessly switch back to your “real” PC
and open that dodgy website that you
meant to launch in Sandbox. Edge browser
and File Explorer windows opened within
Sandbox won’t identify themselves as the
Sandbox versions. Feel free to play around
with the Windows Settings within Sandbox,
if you’d like, and see how it differs from your
main Windows installation.