A virtual machine under WindowsĪ virtual machine, or VM, is an application running under Windows that creates an environment simulating a completely separate computer. The best example is simply that any malware that might have been downloaded and “installed” by the sandboxed application is discarded when the application exits. Not saved when the sandboxed application exits.Not visible outside of the sandbox other Windows applications don’t see it.The primary difference is that anything created or changed by the sandboxed application is: When you run an application inside a sandbox, it continues to have access to everything that it would were it not sandboxed. One of the three applications in this example is drawn as being within a sandbox, including a portion of the “Files & Settings” used by that application. In a sense, a sandbox is a container placed around an application running within Windows. Windows manages access to the files and on-disk resources it also manages access to the hardware through the device drivers that are installed for your machine’s specific hardware configuration.

Windows: a conceptual diagram.Īpplications running in Windows interact with the machine (and with you) through Windows. Let’s start with a conceptual view on how Windows and Windows applications operate (at a very high level). This is a high-level overview meant to convey the concepts for a basic understanding, nothing more. I’m not trying to define exactly how these technologies work at a bits-and-bytes level. Let’s look at the three scenarios: the default case without either, a sandbox, and a virtual machine.įirst, a caveat for the knowledgeable: this is, of necessity, an over-simplification. That would be an accurate statement, but it really only stirs up the mud in what is already muddy water. One could confuse matters further by referring to a virtual machine as the ultimate sandbox. Sandboxes and virtual machines are two different technologies that share enough characteristics to make them easily confused.

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