Very slow "Updating registry at 'C:\Users\me\.julia\registries\General'"

Depending on what is required, WSL is probably a good solution. I did try it and the improvements in speed were very good.

However I also run a Linux installation in VirtualBox, and it turns out that VirtualBox and WSL can’t be installed at the same time. I had to choose between the two, so I chose VirtualBox.

Both Linux’y systems were much faster than Windows (all running on the same hardware, of course). Without any real knowledge on my part, my guess is that a lot of this is because the Windows file system is really slow.