Forum Discussion
Call me crazy, if you like...
Hi,
You’re definitely not crazy — a lot of what you describe touches on real architectural challenges in Windows, especially around boot time and system state.
A few points that may help clarify things:
✔️ Boot time isn’t limited by NVMe speed
Modern Windows boot is dominated by:
- driver initialization
- firmware/UEFI time
- security stack (VBS, HVCI, Secure Boot)
- services starting in parallel
Storage throughput plays a very small role once you’re above SATA speeds.
✔️ The “separate OS / settings / apps” idea exists in several forms
Windows already has components that go in this direction:
- Windows Sandbox / VMs → clean, disposable environments
- Windows Reset / Cloud Reset → rebuilds system state without reinstalling
- Provisioning packages → reapply configuration quickly
- FSLogix / profile containers (in enterprise) → separate user state from OS
- Windows Update for Business → staged OS images
Not exactly what you describe, but the concepts are there.
✔️ Registry reset is harder than it sounds
The registry is deeply intertwined with:
- drivers
- services
- COM registrations
- application state
Resetting it safely requires more than restoring a file — which is why Windows uses component-based servicing instead.
Still, your idea of a “clean state boot” is interesting, and it’s something Microsoft has been exploring through virtualization‑based approaches.
If you want, I can expand on how Windows handles OS state today and why some of these ideas are harder to implement than they seem.