[ajolly]

Windows these days works extremely well with just taking out the hard drive and placing it into a different computer, even across different processor brands completely different hardware etc.

I personally do this all the time. At most you get an extra restart the first time the drive is in a new set of hardware and after that you're good to go.

My main Windows install is probably 8 years old at this point, it's gone between multiple motherboards.

The biggest annoyance is a few pieces of software that tie activation to the motherboard.

If you want to make it even more portable you can install Windows to a vmdk.

And if you want to get a special complicated, you can have that vmdk act as essentially a secondary variant of your main operating system complete with symlinking most of the files and application info, to both save space and so you have most of the same state across both os's, but still can play around and easily roll back any changes.