JULY 2019 PCWorld 115to work within
Sandbox, but I
downloaded a free
third-party antivirus
from BitDefender
and was able to
check individual files
for malware.
As we noted
earlier, Sandbox
demands a price in
terms of perfor-
mance. Running on a
first-gen Surface
Laptop (with a Core i5-7200U Kaby Lake chip
powering it), just three media-rich Edge tabs
within Sandbox gobbled up enough
resources to keep the total CPU utilization well
above 90 percent. I occasionally saw a bit of
stuttering when moving down a webpage.
With a more robust Surface Pro (2017;
go.pcworld.com/micr) and a few code
revisions later, Windows Sandbox ran much
more smoothly.
Don’t think that you’ll be playing games
within Sandbox. But opening an email via
Outlook.com? Sure. Downloading what I
thought was a Linux distribution over
uTorrent? That worked just fine. (Trying to
mount the ISO file within Sandbox, though,
did not.)
How far you incorporate Sandbox into
your everyday life is up to you. We’ve already
seen Sandbox videos demonstrating the
effects of computer viruses (go.pcworld.com/
vrus)—because when they’ve finished
wreaking havoc on the Sandbox virtual
machine, the Sandbox can be shut down. (We
still wouldn’t recommend this with known
dangers, as we can’t say for certain that
malware won’t be able to break out of the
Sandbox virtual machine.) Nevertheless,
Sandbox offers the potential for much more
than app trials.
Note that there are other third-party
sandbox applications that you can still try:
Sandboxie (both free and paid versions);
BitBox, designed specifically for browsing;
ShadeSandbox, and more. All of them have
their own pros and cons. What Windows
Sandbox offers, though, is the convenience
of a free, secure sandboxing solution built
right into Windows. And soon, everyone
with Windows 10 Pro will have it.You won’t see any personalization options by default. It’s probably a good
idea to leave your personal data out of Sandbox unless necessary.