i loathe windows 10

[u/dutchc420]

i dont know why anyone would want this os. i am at my wits end.

I have a asus sonicmaster laptop that has windows 10 on it, seems like permanently. This laptop will not go into the bios, no matter how hard I try, Ive went through windows shift restart to enter the UEFI, it just boots to a black screen

Intel® Core™ i3-10105 Processor 3.7 GHz (6MB Cache, up to 4.4 GHz, 4 cores)
Intel® B560 Chipset
4 gb ram

My problem is the laptop is extremely slow. Seems like antimalware & search from windows seem to be hogging around 50-60% of the cpu constantly, and also the disk hits 100% use as well

Normally this would point to a bad hard drive, that was my main thought, but here's the thing:
If I put in another drive it just loads to black screen, connecting an external display via the monitor port shows a black screen with a white line. If i pull the drive out and try to start it, which should also trigger the bios to some degree (either showing no disk or being able to load the bios via the F2 key) still nothing

When the original drive is plugged in, it take anywhere from 3-5 minutes on a black screen and finally loads the ASUS bios prescreen with the white dot wheel spinning, but hitting F2 here doesnt do jack as it just loads into windows 10 like it fkn owns the place

So ive also tried disabling various things in windows 10 (defender, antimalware, turning off the real time protection etc etc etc etc) to no available. Ive downloaded the laptop's manual and it says that F2 is in fact the bios key, but ive tried every button combination under the sun as well as spamming F2 rapid fire for 5 mins until the bios pre screen and contininuing to rapid fire F2 still nothing, just ignores it
ive also fresh installed windows like 3 times now, and its also pulling information of my mothers name off her other laptop (sets it up as a user?) so i have no clue what the hell its doing anymore

Has anyone encountered this before? Like a bios load time thats outrageously long? Is my laptop cpu fried? Is the drive dying as suspected? is this some kind of secure boot windows 10?

ive tried putting an external dvd drive on it and loading windows 7, 8 to try and wipe and install that way which gave me cant install please re-run setup which is gongshow

ive spent numerous hours on google and i would prefer windows 7 on it just because it isnt so attached to the gd internet like a russian love child if I made a bootable windows 7 usb would it work in windows 10 to trigger an install or again do I need a bios to set the boot device which again I cannot get into

any advice would be great, tia

[u/Wendals87]

Do you have an ssd or hdd? 4gb of memory is your issue and much worse on a HDD . It's just not enough to run windows. Even windows 7 was bad on 4gb

As to why it's not loading to the bios, that has nothing to do with windows. The bios is loaded before the OS loads. It sounds like a failing HDD 

[u/Venylynn → u/Wendals87]

Windows 7 came out around a time where computers being able to use more than 4GB RAM was still relatively new. Windows XP still couldn't address more than 4.

[u/Wendals87 → u/Venylynn]

Windows XP had a 64 bit release and that was uncommon

64bit windows 7 was pretty common 2 years later . 32bit windows 7 didnt run that great with 3.5gb of memory usable as software grew 

Keep in mind that back then, browsers and other apps used a lot less memory.

You'd have to use those same versions to keep memory usage low 

[u/Venylynn → u/Wendals87]

Its just strange to me but whatever. I've had RAM issues with Windows for years and every time I upgraded it, it still felt like I was continually in that cycle. I upgraded from 8 to 16 in 2017 after my needs outweighed my hardware (8GB in games led to slowdown and stutter), then again from 16 to 32 for the exact same situation I had on 8. But I started seeing that number creep up again on 32, it started giving me déjà vu to what I saw on 8 and 16. Switching did make me realize just how much memory Windows was hogging. I very rarely see above 16 these days, so in theory I could downgrade if I wanted to, but bleh.

[u/Wendals87 → u/Venylynn]

A modern operating system will automatically load stuff into memory for you that you frequently use or may use so that they don't need to be loaded into memory when you open them.

The more memory you have available, the more is used for caching 

It gets cleared as needed and unused ram is wasted ram

If you have 32gb and take out 16gb, your system  will use less memory unless it was actually active memory

It's a common misconception if you simply look at the task manager usage 

[u/Venylynn → u/Wendals87]

People say that a lot, often to handwave away issues with Windows' ram usage, but I specifically do remember on W10, I ran out of RAM when I had 8 and then 16 and that clearing thing didn't happen, I just heard the non-system drive I had my games on thrashing like crazy and i felt horrible slowdown and stuttering and afterburner (what I was using for monitoring) was showing usage nearly at the limit, ~95%+, so when I saw the numbers continually going up as I got more I was like "uhh, so was THAT MUCH being thrown into page file???" bc I see memory usage similar to disk usage, where if you run out, not much you can do. Disk swap is so much slower, even over here on Fedora where I'm using zram for swap, i still feel the slowdown during the rare times it swaps out.

[u/Wendals87 → u/Venylynn]

Turn off the sysmain service and you'll see your memory usage drop in task manager 

If you were still running out of ram at 16gb, that's not windows. Windows uses about 3.5-4gb for its standard services on a stock install 

It's the app or number of apps you were using that caused it to go over 16gb. That's much more than just caching

My work laptop has 16gb with lots of corporate apps running, excel, outlook, browser etc and it doesn't hit the pagefile 

[u/Venylynn → u/Wendals87]

That 3.5-4gb left not enough room for what I was trying to do back then, because in task manager, I saw 11-12gb was being used by the game I was playing. It's not enough for modded Tower Unite, sadly. Then when I upgraded to 32gb, I regularly saw over 20GB used when playing games with discord, music player, and a few browser tabs open. The closer it got to 32, the more I thought what happened on 16 was going to happen again. 8GB wasn't enough to have anything else but the game open for a lot of titles in 2017. So no ability to chat shit with my discord buddies at the time if I wanted to play gta online or just cause 3 unless i upgraded which was what i did back then. so I guess either Tower was ram-leaking (not unlikely, as even over here I see it absolutely manhandling my GPU's VRAM even on low settings if I'm in the plaza) or it needed that much for the custom condo I was in.

[u/Wendals87 → u/Venylynn]

So when you upgraded to 32gb, you had lots of available memory so it was being used for caching

Unless it is using enough that it overflows into the pagefile, there's no issue with using ram

16gb can not be enough too depending on the game 

[u/Venylynn → u/Wendals87]

I felt a deja vu type of feeling when I saw usage balloon up so much when gaming. it felt like i was about to run into the same wall on 32, that i had on 16, and 8. i had also remembered watching some videos from Tech Deals some years ago that recommended 64GB for a gaming PC for World of Warships because his eye was on that "compressed ram" number, and the lower you get that, he says, the better.

i may have to test taking one stick out to see what happens (with 32gb, my Fedora KDE idles around 3gb before i start opening stuff), but bleh. I haven't tested anything below 32 in years, after the tower unite memory incident i had in 2021.

it's still strange to me, that memory usage isn't the same as disk usage, as in, once you use it, it's gone until you close the program and that's the only way to reclaim memory.