Performance Issues: Is it Always Windows Fault?

I see a lot of people complaining about Windows 10/11 performance in forums. Others suggest they abandon windows for Linux instead because Windows is bullshit!

I’m obsessed with Windows performance and love troubleshooting and fixing Windows Performance issues. I can tell you that most of the time, performance issues are caused by third-party programs and drivers or a misconfiguration.

The case I’ll talk about has been reported by someone that complained about his Windows 10 computer taking more than 2 minutes to boot.

It’s a long boot time for an MSI gamer PC with 4 SSD disks, 32 Gb RAM, and 3.5 Ghz CPU!

My preferred tool for troubleshooting performance issues is “Windows Performance Toolkit,” which you can download for free from the Microsoft website.

?Windows Performance Analyzer shows 2 minutes plus delay in the pre-session init phase.

In the CPU graph, I can see that the “system” process is calling functions from the “volsnap.sys” driver dealing with volume snapshots during the 2 minutes interval.

?When a volume is brought online or reverted to a snapshot during the boot, the volume snapshot driver reads the diff area for the most-recent persistent snapshot (if any).

Volume snapshots (or shadow copies) are point-in-time copies of the volume. It’s a type of backup that allows you to restore the system state to its previous value.

?This feature is enabled by default in Windows for the C: drive.

It allows Windows to automatically take volume snapshots when installing a new program or installing Windows updates.

This allows you to restore the previous system configuration in case of any problem.

?Is it a great feature?

YES, but If the maximum disk space reserved to store the snapshots is not well configured, it can turn your life into a nightmare.

This is what happened to this user when he chose to use 30% of its 2 Tb disk for snapshots.

Having more than 550 Gb of volume snapshots to check during the boot, Windows took more time than usual to perform this task.

?I asked the user to reduce the maximum allowed disk space to a reasonable amount and delete the previous snapshot;

His computer booted in 5 seconds ??

?It’s not always Windows fault; The programs we use, the drivers we install, the system configuration we make can impact Windows performance.?