ZDNet has an article saying what it needs to get Windows 9 the love it needs. It’s actually 12, but the last 7 are in bullet points near the end… I’ll say that the #3 item on there would be huge. With a lot of people, myself included, using an SSD for OS and a standard drive for applications and data, it’d make a lot of sense to have an option to separate the two. Right now, it can be done with a registry change. However, it can break some applications (you have to install IE first, then change the path for Program File). Little tweaks like that would be extremely beneficial to some users.

It’s 2014, and drives are cheap. It should be easy – and by easy, I mean as close to automatic as possible – to make Windows take notice of the fact a system has multiple drives and use one for Windows and programs, and the other for data.

Taking this a step further, I’d like to see Windows isolate all applications from the operating system in such a way that I can, with a click of the mouse, either blitz all the settings of a specific application to default, or even remove that application from the system, deleting all of its setting with it. This would go a long way to eliminating the bitrot and slowdowns that affect Windows as time goes on.

Windows 8 already has a feature that rolls Windows back to an “out of the box” state, but this is a very blunt instrument. Repairing an operating s system should no longer means nuking everything and starting from scratch.