I was having really slow PC response times after I installed a WD10EAVS 1 TB USB 2.0 drive. Running Sysinternals Process Explorer revealed high DPC and high System CPU utilization. It would even take a few moments for keypresses to appear on the screen, that is how bad it got. 96% CPU utilization on average, but as soon as I disconnected the drive it immediately went away…down to 0%-2%.
I went into the Control Panel–>Power Options. I set the Power Scheme to ALWAYS ON, Turn off hard disks: Never, System Standby: Never.
IMMEDIATELY fixed the issue I was having. Hope this helps someone.
