W11 on a Laptop

My first experience started with W10 on a lenovo 10" 4GB several years ago. I quickly found that 4GB was hopelessly undersized for W10 as it would always go into cpu100% for hours at a time while it was updating its as per compulsory Microsoft diktats. I never found a ways to control this properly as it always seem to default.

The only way I could remotely make this m/c usable was to leave it online 24/7. After a day it would settle down and the cursor would stop freezing up etc. I avoided even closing the lid for more than a few hours while moving around off line. I couldnt expect to open it up at a meeting and carry on.

So that m/c is on the shelf till I get round to binning it (originally £250)

I recently acquired a Used Acer aspire 3 with 16GB and after cleaning it up from the previous user who had gummed up the m/c with rubbish settings which made it very slow to start up (15mins). Been there done that.
Still only a year old and 1/4 of new price.

However I noticed the SOS when closing lid for off line period and have had a few annoying waste of time opening up again - not as bad as before.

So anyone out there had similar issues. Are there some settings for collecting and scheduling routine updates that I can control reliably? I would be quite happy to set a time say Monday 2am to 6am when house keeping can be done. I thought W11 would do this by default, what am I missing? BTW IMHO nothing less than 16GB ram should be used with W11.
I had 8GB on my Aspire desktop and the cpu was often running hard (not a good idea?). I was using an IP cam software called Ispy with 4 Tapo security Cams with inbuilt 50G chip storage. That put a 30% cpu load.

FWIW I am moving over to Android 9 used Lenovo M8 tablets (very cheap way using Tapo Link s/w). So each camera will have its own display and the load will be off my desktop - bit OTT but may help so

Setting your active hours in Windows Settings will go a long way to reducing Windows Update from trying to update when you are using the machine, for one thing.

Windows Settings --> Windows Update --> Advanced options --> Active hours





Note that by default, it is set to automatically on the right (where mine shows manually), and Windows tries to set up its routines outside of the times listed there. But if you change it to manually, you can force it to use the times that you want without any automatic 'adjustments' to get your exact window, though it will only allow for an 18 hour time gap, so you may need to do something like 7 AM to 1 AM (which should be the theoretical max of 18 hours), or some other 6 hour gap of your choosing.

Were there other aspects you were also interested in controlling?

My laptop runs Win 11 very well with 4GB.

Not sure how this helps the OP.... lol.