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 a 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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

Zine.

Bendjaballah Zine Eddine

IT Engineer

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