Why is Windows so slow?

Here is a link from the comments:

NTFS Performance Hacks - http://oreilly.com/pub/a/windows/2005/02/08/NTFS_Hacks.html

Not sure about the other things, but this

The default cluster size on NTFS volumes is 4K, which is fine if your files are typically small and generally remain the same size. But if your files are generally much larger or tend to grow over time as applications modify them, try increasing the cluster size on your drives to 16K or even 32K to compensate. That will reduce the amount of space you are wasting on your drives and will allow files to open slightly faster.

is wrong. When you increase cluster size you will definitely not "reduce the amount of space you are wasting". 100B file will still occupy the whole 16KB ( so you will waste 15.9KB on it instead of 3.9KB with 4KB clusters.

Also I would be very careful with taking advice like that from an article which is 6 years old (before introduction of Win7 or XP SP3!)

That's not the point he's trying to make. Smaller cluster sizes leads to larger amounts of file-system metadata keeping track of where those clusters are laid out on disk, as well as the overhead of generating, accessing, and updating those data structures.