I have been using a number of VSTi's (Garritan CFX, Bechstein DG in Kontakt, Pianoteq) for my silent piano on an i5 laptop running Windows 10 over the last 5 years or so. A problem has always been that Windows is doing all kinds of things under the hood that intermittently make programs run slow. On my computer this leads to very long latencies on midi processing (audio is mostly fine strangely). In the past this was only the case in the first few minutes after startup or wake-up, but since a year or so this happens really a lot. It seems that with every update it is getting worse and it is becoming intolerable. Windows seems to keep on adding functionality that I don't want (e.g. updates on traffic in my neighborhood) and that seems to interfere with what I do want: a responsive system.
Does anyone know of a guide/document explaining how to switch off interfering nonsense on Windows 10? I only need it as a virtual piano.
Alternatively I could use a Raspberry Pi as a dedicated machine for VSTi, but then I can probably only run Pianoteq as that is they only one compatible with Linux.