Why is Windows so slow?

I suspect it has something to do with NTFS updating access times by default. So every time you do anything with a file, it gets its access time updated (not modification time, access time). I don't have windows to test on, but you could try the suggestions [1][2] below.

[1] http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms940846(v=winembedd...

[2] http://oreilly.com/pub/a/windows/2005/02/08/NTFS_Hacks.html (#8)

But most Linux distros do this by default as well. You have to mount with noatime to get rid of it.

As posted elsewhere and as someone pointed out in the very comments of the article: That doesn't seem to be the case for Windows 7 anymore.

Linux has defaulted to relatime since 2009.

In fact nowadays most (all?) linux filesystems use relatime as default, which carries most of the advantages of both atime and noatime. See http://kerneltrap.org/node/14148

I don't know if something similar exists under windows (I suppose it doesn't).

Mac OS X does appear to mount with atime but I happened to use this:

    $ cat /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.nullvision.noatime.plist    
    <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
    <!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" 
            "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
    <plist version="1.0">
        <dict>
            <key>Label</key>
            <string>com.nullvision.noatime</string>
            <key>ProgramArguments</key>
            <array>
                <string>mount</string>
                <string>-vuwo</string>
                <string>noatime</string>
                <string>/</string>
            </array>
            <key>RunAtLoad</key>
            <true/>
        </dict>
    </plist>

I don't know if there's anything like relatime.

The updating of last access time has been disabled since the release of Windows Vista (although you can turn it back on):

http://blogs.technet.com/b/filecab/archive/2006/11/07/disabl...