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)
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!"
(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)