>Speaking of hardcoded paths, I think W2000 was the last one you could install somewhere else and C:\windows wasn't mandatory. One of daughters and I both had machines without c: drive for a while, and I even had 2-3 installations of W2k (or some other) on the same machine. Didn't have a boot manager so I could boot only the last one - the others were there for cases when I may need to restore a dll of some piece of config - and it was interesting to see who didn't use the environment variables to find system folders, but went blindly for c:\windows\system\something and crashed because there was no c: drive. Don't remember where XP was on this, maybe it also could survive without C: or agree to install on c:\whp or some such folder, maybe not. Vista and later, no, not relocatable, all paths are hardcoded, no matter the environment variables.

Yupp, W2K was lean and mean. I had 2 or three bootable partitions, common D: for Data, E: for exe, F: for FAT32 (go-between to the Linux partitions I experimented with, back then Knoppix IIRC.

SCSI and IDE bricks totaling todays cheap USB sticks - I think I had 4 4 GB drives, 1 2GB plus an IDE for booting into DOS/Win98. Only 1 entry in the config file to point to a bootable partition. Of course I went overboard to always have a bootable system ;-)