While Microsoft absolutely is spying on you -- and will turn on settings previously turned off, even hidden ones that registry edits can change -- freezes, stutters, etc. is likely related to page file being assigned to a hard drive, or indexing.
Hard drives are very slow, as are old and/or unhealthy SATA SSDs. When your OS is trying to index or call on the page file, your performance will slow. Depending on the amount of time that's required, you may not notice it. It also happens at all times, many times per second.
This can also be exacerbated by an aged or low end CPU and RAM.
It's likely that when you remove the drive, it stops because the indexing isn't..indexing that drive anymore, or the page file isn't mistakenly being re-assigned to that drive.
As one example, I had a 12 year old 1TB HDD. Its health was clearly not very good. My PC slowed down, and I have extreme sensitivity to stuttering (which is why when gaming I'm an FPS whore). During two separate periods of time, my page file had decided that it wanted to target that HDD as its source, and brought my PC to its knees.
This was also tricky to sort out and troubleshoot because in normal circumstances, A) page file shouldn't be affecting performance that badly and, more importantly, B) page file should not be changing its settings by default, unless the OS was being a bitch (which, Microsoft has ensured it is)
While Microsoft absolutely is spying on you -- and will turn on settings previously turned off, even hidden ones that registry edits can change -- freezes, stutters, etc. is likely related to page file being assigned to a hard drive, or indexing.
Hard drives are very slow, as are old and/or unhealthy SATA SSDs. When your OS is trying to index or call on the page file, your performance will slow. Depending on the amount of time that's required, you may not notice it. It also happens at all times, many times per second.
This can also be exacerbated by an aged or low end CPU and RAM.
It's likely that when you remove the drive, it stops because the indexing isn't..indexing that drive anymore, or the page file isn't mistakenly being re-assigned to that drive.
As one example, I had a 12 year old 1TB HDD. Its health was clearly not very good. My PC slowed down, and I have extreme sensitivity to stuttering (which is why when gaming I'm an FPS whore). During two separate periods of time, my page file had decided that it wanted to target that HDD as its source, and brought my PC to its knees.
This was also tricky to sort out and troubleshoot because in normal circumstances, A) page file shouldn't be affecting performance that badly and, more importantly, B) page file should not be changing its settings by default, unless the OS was being a bitch (which, Microsoft has ensured it is)
That is why Linux.