> On top of that, the update process slows the rest of the system almost to a halt, because of all the hard drive activity
As far as I'm aware, that's a problem only on Linux, because Windows has a desktop-grade IO scheduler tuned to interactive usage (whereas in Linux both the CPU and IO schedulers are written for maximum throughput).
Windows is quite capable of messing this one up as well; if your browser profile is on the same disk as you're doing something heavy, it'll end up blocking the browser while waiting to commit.
As far as I'm aware, that's a problem only on Linux, because Windows has a desktop-grade IO scheduler tuned to interactive usage (whereas in Linux both the CPU and IO schedulers are written for maximum throughput).