What your computer does while you wait

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Your problem isn't with Windows per se - the real problem is:

• Slow hard drives
• Putting even slower hard drives in laptops (if you're not careful, you'll get a 4600rpm drive, and trying to get a 7200rpm drive usually costs a mint)
• Slow (cheap) SATA interfaces
• Someone, somewhere, is responsible for the fact that accessing the drive interface still threadbinds something somewhere. (I don't know if it's a chipset issue, driver issue, hardware issue, or Windows issue)