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.