On Windows, a reason for this might be virus scanners. Get rid of all third party virus scanners and tune the settings on the built in ones.
I personally am of the opinion that virus scanners are a waste of computing resources, in that if you reach the point where a binary you run has been infected you are probably compromised in ways a virus scanner cannot fix anyways.
Unfortunately it's getting harder and harder to keep things running with various licensing schemes and whatnot. Hell Microsoft even keeps breaking my old Office install with windows 10 updates forcing me to constantly fix it because they want me to update to their office 360 offering. All that said, both the hardware and software stack are getting a little silly even at the low level. You can send a keypress around the world as a data packet faster than you can send it to your monitor now a days.
My #1 frustration as a Windows user is that every so often an applications or the whole system freezes up for a few seconds. I use MacOS sometimes and also Linux and I don't think either one is much better.
For instance when I launch a command prompt often it is up in <1s, but sometimes it takes 10s. That's a very simple program, but often there are security checks involved; even ssh logins to a linux server on a LAN have a long-tail distribution in time-to-prompt because maybe some daemon was swapped out.
I would be satisfied I had some visual indication that progress was happening (ALWAYS AND <100ms LATENCY) and some insight into the process (e.g. real progressbars... if hadoop can do it, why can't pandas?)
We don't want to trouble people with details, but what's the harm in telling the user we are waiting on a 30 second timeout?