What is Windows Sandbox? How to setup Sandbox in Windows?

What is Windows Sandbox:

Windows Sandbox is a new feature available beginning with the Windows 10 May 2019 Update (version 1903) designed to run untrusted applications inside the operating system.  It provides a lightweight isolated environment running independently from your main installation.

Technically, Windows Sandbox is a virtual machine created on demand using Microsoft’s hypervisor using the same OS image as the one installed on your system/machine. However, it’s a very lightweight environment of around 100MB, which has been optimized to boot and run faster, its focus is on security, and it works more efficiently using an integrated kernel scheduler, virtual graphics, and smart memory management.

Basically, Sandbox is a built-in virtual machine feature that can be enabled from the Windows feature’s options.  It’s very light and amazing environment of around 100MB.  Now there will be no need to download and install heavy software like VirtualBox, VMWare etc.

How to Setup Windows Sandbox

Before you can start using Sandbox in Windows 10, you need to enable it first. Sandbox is only available to those who have Windows 10 Professional or higher such as Windows 10 Enterprise and so on. The first thing you need to do is check to see if virtualization is turned on your system in BIOS. Why? Because a sandbox is essentially a virtual machine. It’s like running Windows 10 inside of Windows 10. The easiest way to check is from the Task Manager. To do that, right-click an empty spot from the taskbar press Ctrl + Alt and Delete button together and then select Task Manager. Now if you see the small window click more details. Click the performance tab and make sure you are in the CPU section from the left side. All right! Now look at the bottom-right part of the task manager. It should be mentioned if the virtualization is enabled or disabled. If it is enabled, that means virtualization is enabled. But, if it says disabled, then that means it is disabled and you must enable it.

To enable virtualization on Windows 10. you need to access the UEFI or BIOS settings. For newer computers, because they boot so quickly to Windows 10, you have to access the BIOS via advanced startup options.

 Well, now let’s say you have enabled virtualization. What now? Well, let’s go back to Windows 10. And this time click the start button and then type Windows features in the search field. And then from the search results select Turn Windows features on or off. All right! Now you will see a list of features.

Go down until you see Windows sandbox and make sure that is checked. And that’s it! You are done. Once you have done this, Windows sandbox is now enabled. All right! Now once your PC is back and running click the start button and then type Sandbox in the search field and select Sandbox from the search results. And there it is! It’s working. There you go! this is Windows 10 Sandbox. A computer inside a computer.