>The goal being reducing a lot of the background work constantly being done on my Windows machine, which makes it real loud for seemingly no good reason whatsoe

>The goal being reducing a lot of the background work constantly being done on my Windows machine, which makes it real loud for seemingly no good reason whatsoever, as if I was mining Bitcoin when I'm just surfin' the damn web. Specs? If it’s a desktop PC then what case and how many fans? Did you try adjusting the fan curves or undervolting? My PC is dead silent (i5-13600k) and pretty much all desktop PC can be made more silent either hardware or software way. But honestly if the default antivirus has this big effect on your PC then you have some bigger problems. By default it’s basically not using any CPU at all.