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Please do not make this a Pro / Enterprise feature. I do remote tech support for my parents and would love for them to browse / use apps in a sandbox.
by dman 8y ago
Please do not make this a Pro / Enterprise feature. I do remote tech support for my parents and would love for them to browse / use apps in a sandbox.
- voltagex_ 8y agoAgreed, but at least it isn't gated off like Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection
- dkdbejwi383 8y agoAgreed, this sounds like a genuinely useful feature, it’s a shame to hide it and restrict it to pro users only. Things like this should be “first class citizens” of the OS and in the spotlight for marketing.
- voltagex_ 8y agoAh, it's Pro because it's using Hyper-V.
- n-gatedotcom 8y agoThen make Hyper-v home. Seriously this is a killer feature needed by everybody. And specially the non-pro users.
- JaRail 8y agoA lot (most?) of the hardware Home runs on doesn't support hardware virtualization.
- coder543 8y agoEffectively all x86_64 hardware from the last 10+ years supports hardware virtualization, so I can't agree.
- justincormack 8y agoNot necessarily in the Bios settings. And there are CPUs without still.
- kevingadd 8y agoAside from the points made by another reply (BIOS support, older CPUs), some machines have virtualization switched off by default because it's broken. I had a (fairly old) x86-64 laptop that would randomly hardlock while running VMs if I turned on hardware virtualization.
- Already__Taken 8y ago£2,500 Dell XPS ships Home out of the box unless specified otherwise. Windows SKU has nothing to do with hardware. https://www.dell.com/en-uk/shop/2-in-1-laptops/new-xps-15-2-in-1/spd/xps-15-9575-2-in-1-laptop/cn95704?view=configurations https://www.dell.com/en-uk/shop/2-in-1-laptops/new-xps-15-2-... Actually I can't seem to configure that directly from dell to come with Pro lol. Seems there's a question about that too.
- wongarsu 8y agoWith Dell you have to buy the business version of a notebook to get Windows Pro. Your example would be [1][2]. Apart from price the main differences are that the business versions ship with Windows Pro and that they have better warranty (next-day onsite). 1: https://www.dell.com/en-uk/work/shop/tablets-and-2-in-1-laptops/xps-15-2-in-1/spd/xps-15-9575-2-in-1-laptop https://www.dell.com/en-uk/work/shop/tablets-and-2-in-1-lapt... 2: https://www.dell.com/en-uk/work/shop/laptops/new-xps-15-2-in-1/spd/xps-15-9575-2-in-1-laptop/bn95704?view=configurations https://www.dell.com/en-uk/work/shop/laptops/new-xps-15-2-in...
- WorldMaker 8y agoThe Windows Store in Windows 10 has a "one-click" $99 upgrade from Home to Pro, Dell doesn't really need to offer it as a configuration item anymore.
- joshAg 8y agowhy not just buy them a pro edition? I know it's more expensive, but that would also get you remote desktop, bitlocker, and group policy, which would all also be great for remote supporting your parents.
- dman 8y agoBecause sometimes they buy a new computer and it is a while before I am able to visit them across the planet and install a new OS in it. Would really like a good out of the box experience.
- Schlaefer 8y agoYou don't need to install a new OS, you just enter a Windows Pro license key to upgrade the version? Buy the key online, send it to your parents, tell them where to enter it, done. Also I don't think your parents want to use that particular sandbox. There's no persistence at all: no bookmarks, no cookies, no history, no local documents, ...
- dman 8y agoThe no persistence is why I like it. It would be ideal if I could ask my parents to do their entire browsing in an ephemeral sandbox and even if they end up clicking / installing something from a shady link it wont blow away their (real) persistent OS install.
- joshAg 8y agoTotally get that issue. It might be worth spending a day or weekend making a boot-disk for them that will wipe their current disk image, and install win10 pro with it set-up so you can remote admin it. That way for your parents they just have to buy the pc, put the usb in and reboot it, and then call you when it's back on so you can remote in and give it a key and finish configuring it for them. I suppose even that might cause issues if you can't teach them or walk them through via facetime how to set the device to boot from the usb instead of the harddrive.
- lotsofpulp 8y ago
- abhiminator 8y agoAgreed. I'd go so as far to say that consumers -- especially technologically vulnerable ones like your parents, for example -- need this more than any other demographic. Microsoft should make it easy to download, install and update on all non-Enterprise versions of the OS. This will also greatly reduce instances of a random ransomware holding critical data hostage and doing irreparable economic damage to small businesses (as was visible during the WannaCry episode last spring [0]). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WannaCry_ransomware_attack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WannaCry_ransomware_attack
- plq 8y ago> Microsoft should make it easy to download, install and update on all non-Enterprise versions of the OS. I'll take this one step further: Microsoft should make this as easy as "right click > Run in Sandbox". It would make the lives of everyone so much easier.
- pjmlp 8y agoThat is what Windows store apps and MSIX sandbox are for.
- Santosh83 8y agoYou can't run a non-Store app in such a sandbox I believe?
- pjmlp 8y agoOnly when packaged via MSIX, which is why I mentioned it.
- TeMPOraL 8y agoExcept Windows store apps are strictly worse than being able to run regular Windows software in a sandbox.
- hawski 8y agoI'm not much of a Windows user, but MSIX sounds great. Does it add a simple context menu entry to convert an installer? Bonus points for straight up Install and even more for Run. I see it's open source, so if it's missing it may be possible to make a distribution of it with those things implemented. Then one could install it and make it a default msi handler. Edit: from what I see conversion is much more involved. Create a certificate and go through a wizard and fill out some forms. Correct me if the is a quick and easy convert option. Otherwise it's a nice thing that needs more development to be useful for a generic user.
- Illniyar 8y agoHardware virtualization is a Pro feature in windows, so I doubt this is possible even if they wanted to (without moving virtualization to home edition).
- ezoe 8y agoYour problem can be solved by not let your parents use Windows.
- cm2187 8y agoLike get them to learn a lot of linux command lines?
- coder543 8y agoI'm pretty sure that's not the only alternative... some others include a Chromebook, an iPad, a MacBook, or even installing a Linux distro and setting it up for them such that they don't need to use the CLI to accomplish the things they want to do. But honestly, my opinion is that Windows 10 is not as fragile as earlier versions of Windows were.
- cm2187 8y agoIf the parents' problem is that they install random software, that's not going to help them. I have seen MacBooks with twenty spyware browser extensions.
- coder543 8y agoI really doubt that, but I can't easily argue with an anecdote, so sure. It happened, probably 15 years ago. Windows was famous for tons of installers bundling toolbars, but that's never been an epidemic on Mac. These days, Macs will not install unsigned software by default, and you can lock that down to App Store only with a single setting change, so they're certainly not getting bundled malicious toolbars from installing software... since distributing malware is a quick way to get your developer signature revoked, and you're certainly not going to be installing toolbars from the App Store sandbox. That leaves manually installing malicious toolbars through the official extension store for whatever browser they use. All extension stores do their best to weed out malicious extensions these days, and it takes intentional effort to install extensions. It doesn't just happen while you're trying to do other things. Obviously, toolbars don't even exist on iPads, and software installers bundling random malware is obviously not a huge concern on Chromebooks. A MacBook was not at the front of my list, so I don't know why you chose to singularly attack that option. Maybe you thought it was the easiest target?
- ChuckMcM 8y agoThink of it like giving your parent's a $100 present for Christmas, an upgrade from Win Home to Win Pro and your life will be so much easier.
- dman 8y agoSure, but Microsoft could give the same gift to every parent out there. (I don’t mind buying windows pro for parents at all, issue is that when they buy a device it often does not come with pro preinstalled so there is a window where the device is vulnerable before I can remotely administer it)
- ChuckMcM 8y agoOf course they could, but using that money they will go on to build another feature that you'll be able to use because you're already at the 'pro' level of their OS. The alternative is to convince some engineers to create this same feature in their spare time and contribute it for free as a Linux package. Then they can get email about all of the things it doesn't do, and fix bugs in their spare time on a feature that all they see are complaints for. Until they burn out and the repo goes dead for a while and then gets picked up by one of those users who wants the feature to exist, and they make some improvements and get into an argument with another user who forks it and now there are two of them, almost the same but with a few features that are unique to each one. Of course for most of the users they either don't care and load one at random, or they do care and find features from the "other" system they want in the one that is being used. They send mail to the maintainers asking them to copy those features. Which adds more pain as the developers copy each other's features but they put their own special spin on them. This burns out more developers and a third person comes out and writes their own syntactically incompatible version that is functionally identical to the two different 'legacy' versions. At this point I just pay the man his $100 and appreciate that the people working on the code are on it all day and can spend evenings with their family.
- theandrewbailey 8y agoI took an inventory of which apps my parents use: email, solitaire, Youtube, and some web browsing. That was it. Linux is good at doing those things, so I put them on Xubuntu (my preferred distro) about 8 years ago. Once my mom understood that the UI was similar enough to Windows, she didn't mind. Its been remarkably stable (and usable) ever since.
- josho 8y agoYou underestimate your parents likelihood to overgeneralize your sandbox advice. I expect you will be receiving this call months from now: "You told me to use sandbox to be safe, so I wrote critical document X in a sandbox because I want it to be safe, but now that I rebooted I've lost all of my work."