A disposable VM is the best test bench a $0 budget buys

The bench in five steps

1. Hyper-V Quick Create → Windows 11 dev environment — Microsoft publishes evaluation VMs with no license games needed.
2. Optional but calming: checkpoints off, TPM off via Set-VM; explicit configuration you reason about beats implicit.
3. Get the file in: enhanced session clipboard copy of small installers, or a share on an ISO you read-only attach. Copy out anything you need; don't persist tools you don't own in there.
4. Drive the app fully: install, all features, uninstall, then reg query/dir on the places its documentation claims to touch — evidence over vibes.
5. Delete the VM disk. Nothing psychological follows you to the host.

What this buys besides paranoia

• Uninstall verification: messy uninstallers surface when everything in the VM you care to protect is zero.
• First-run behavior: initial-release bugs occur once per profile; the VM where you can recreate profile-on demand is where you see them.
• Documentation drift: claims about per-user scope are testable in ten minutes in front of a fresh hive — see how ProofTune's own VM-gate runbook encodes this into the release pipeline so the test happens before you can be asked to.

ProofTune ProjectEngineering notes — every claim here names the bytes a real tool touches. Verify first, install second.