It isn’t the processor resources being used up that bugs me so much, but the way the hard drive is continuously accessing, and you see “100% Disk Usage” on the task manager…
I dunno if “Bloatware” can be accounted for all of that, but the telemetry being sent back to Google, Microsoft etc - doesn’t need to be harvested every second of every day, or at every power-up, or every day at the same time dammit!
I’m the same user as I was yesterday, the week before, and the year before that.
Continuously polling my machine without my consent - achieves nothing for me the owner of the machine, whatsoever.
I found these two pages quite useful in how to switch the auto-updating off, and keep it off, by denying certain access areas in the registry.
This in time, will extend the life of my hard drive, which represents the soul of my machine than the hardware that happens to make up my current desktop PC.
For my desktop machine, I’ve elected to buy a cheap off-the-rack model with a built-in hard drive with factory installed windows on that internal hard drive.
That hard drive, I then bypass and make my slave drive, whilst I transfer my old master drive from my old machine from 2011 - and run a twin boot structure from that. If one boot block fails, I can always boot the “b” side in that way…
What used to be the internal factory windows drive - now gets used to store downloads, so that the only thing I risk ever getting compromised - is itself, should I accidentally download a malicious update from MS…
Let’s face it - there can’t really be a "New danger from (example) Putin’s Russia every single week, requiring this further “Bloatware” update that’ll slow my machine down even more, so I do without them.
Guess what? - The “Third World” Viruses and Malware the machine was originally long-immune to - don’t come back to haunt me, just because I have not downloaded the 4th update patch released by MS this month… Ever thought that these Chinese and Russian hackers we get told of - must be total genius types if they can not only code so well, but speak such perfect ENGLISH code as they do - that they are untracable, and unstoppable… Nope. Not buying that old tosh that “Chan and Igor are behind the latest infrastructure failure” - It’s Deep State using their convienient Whipping Boys as per usual…
My machine has not needed to be “cleaned” since 2014 now, in that I have not needed to wipe my hard drive and re-installed because it has fallen over so much by that point…
“Trigger’s Broom” - Works! I have a 2009 hard drive in a 2011 machine, now transferred to a new tower where I replaced the internal drive with my old one. My 2011 machine - continues to get used by my Mrs, and we do all online shopping stuff on there, because that machine has the anti virus on it, but my new one - doesn’t. I only have to be wary of “password harvesting shunts” where you click on a link that takes you to the genuine log-in page of say, Ebay - and harvests your username and passwords from “Autofill”. What a leak to one’s privacy THAT turned out to be!
I always log into stuff manually entering the password each time. There’s nothing stored there that makes any sense, because I keep my passwords in a doc with a load of E-Books, so even if you sat down at my machine and attempted to hack my passwords - you woudn’t know what was what.
I prefer NOT to change my passwords every five minutes, because when you do opt to change them - you are vulnerable to any random “driveby keylogger” as you do.
Better to keep the same old passwords for as long as possible…
“Deleting Cookies” is something I do often as well. There’s no upside for the user, other than so-called “Log-in Convienience”… Big deal!
“Privacy Achieved” is PRICELESS, especially these days… 
but required more time than I had spare to get to grips with it. I always keep coming back to Mint (still in the top three most popular distros 
