I tried running Windows from an external drive and was surprised by how usable it is

Running Windows from an external drive is one of those ideas that sounds more inconvenient than it’s worth. I assumed sluggish boot times and driver headaches would make it impractical for anything beyond a one-off experiment. So I wasn’t expecting much when I dropped a PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD into an external enclosure that I normally use for fast file transfers and started using it as a secondary environment on my laptop. It held up better than I gave it credit for, with some caveats worth knowing before you try it yourself.