NT becomes unresponsive during an NTFS disk operation such as a dir.

A. When you perform a large NTFS disk operation such as adir/s *.* or a ntbackup :*.* NT can sometimes become unresponsive because NTupdates NTFS files with a last access stamp and if viewing thousands of filesthe NTFS log file can become full and waits to be flushed to the hard disk,this can cause NT to become unresponsive. To stop NTFS updating the last accessstamp perform the following:

This should improve the performance of your NTFS partitions.

Below is an example or a .reg file that can be used to automate this:

REGEDIT4
;
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetControlFileSystem]
"NtfsDisableLastAccessUpdate"=dword:1