FWIW, I've used a stock Windows VM + Chrome a few times for testing things. Of course you don't freeze it solid, you just take a snapshot before installing the

FWIW, I've used a stock Windows VM + Chrome a few times for testing things. Of course you don't freeze it solid, you just take a snapshot before installing the browser, and revert to that snapshot whenever you want to update the OS. For the screen real-estate issue, just get a VM viewer that doesn't insist on showing the full screen. You also don't block cookies every second, you just wipe them regularly. The Captcha services don't particularly care, since obviously they don't want to punish people on a fresh system. They care far, far more about whether I'm going through a commercial VPN, doubly so if I'm using Tor. But if I'm really worried about IP tracking, I usually run it through my university network. Of course, a sufficiently-motivated fingerprinting service can surmount any barrier in theory, with typographic analysis and whatnot. But in practice, websites tend not to care to an extraordinary extent. E.g., I remember one person who was convinced that Google/YouTube used your specific IP address (not just your cookies, or your geo-IP location) as a major part of ad targeting. But lo and behold, the whole VM setup consistently gave me a generic set of ads, as did just wiping my browser cookies. Of course, their explanation was "Of course they're detecting that you're trying to sniff them out, so they're only giving you generic ads to uphold the conspiracy!" As if cookies + geo-IP weren't more than enough for 99.9% of users they want to display ads to.