Windows XP fails to play nice with heavy I/O operations occurring on volumes formatted with the NTFS file system. On a Windows XP-based computer, you have an NTFS-formatted volume. You enable the Compress drive to save disk space option on this volume. After you do this, the operating system stops responding when there are heavy I/O operations on this volume,” Microsoft explained. For the time being, XP users that have come across this issue will need to use a hotfix from Microsoft in order to allow heavy I/O operating on NTFS formatted volumes for XP SP2 and XP Sp3 even in the context in which disk compression is enabled. Microsoft did not provide sufficient details to properly define “heavy I/O operations” for the end users.