[JohnBooty]

A clean install of Windows 10 is close to literally unusable on my 11-inch Dell AMD A9-9420e laptop, with 16GB (lol) RAM and SATA SSD.

Basically, the "Windows Antimalware Executable" and various other Windows processes keep one of the two CPU cores more or less constantly pegged. Everything takes ages. The only way to really use this damn thing is to disable Windows' realtime virus protection, which, well.... ouch. And it's still barely tolerable just for playing music files and the most basic of web browsing.

Granted, that's a cheap and hugely underpowered laptop.

But this was disappointing to me because I had a 1.3GHZ Core Solo based machine with 4GB and a primitive SSD running Windows 7 circa 2009/2010 and it was plenty usable.

[ethbro]

That's not normal behavior, per my experience.

Are you sure Dell didn't ship it with something that, f.ex. is constantly making privileged calls and thereby causing AV to be invoked?

Wouldn't be the first time.

[JohnBooty]

Pretty sure. I physically removed the HDD that shipped with the laptop, put an SSD in, and did a fresh Windows 10 install. 16GB RAM, too.

(Yes, part of my reason for buying this refurb'd Dell is because I thought it would be hilarious to put 16GB of RAM and a huge SSD into a crap netbook hahaha)

I haven't dug too deeply into it, but in dozens of hours of use and casual observation... it seems to me that if Windows Defender's realtime protection is enabled, then any disk access causes Windows Defender AV to be invoked which in turn leads to high CPU usage.

Dropbox was an absolute killer while it did its initial several GB of file syncing over the LAN. Dropbox pegged one CPU core, while Windows' antimalware pegged another. Same with iTunes while I was downloading my music collection from iTunes in the Cloud.

Now, both of those examples involved network traffic as well as disk I/O. So, I'm not exactly sure what Windows' antimalware was fretting about.

(Also keep in mind that the CPU we're talking about here, is a very low power dual-core AMD A9 chip. I don't see this problem on my desktop machine. On that, the antimalware CPU usage is low enough that I just don't care)

[ethbro]

Yeah, a lot of stuff should be more rigorously tested on single and dual-core environments.

Especially when it relates to OS-handling (specifically: Windows), I feel like we've papered over a huge number of poorly sequenced, blocking calls with "more cores!"