Hi guys, what could be the course of action to reduce/eliminate the lag that win10 has everytime an application is opened? It's particularly evident with office/excel files, it's like every file is scanned before opening it, but I only have the default protection settings. The system is a ryzen 3900XT - Asus prime x570 pro - nvme Samsung 970pro. It's slower than my old core 2 duo with Windows 7, in those situations.
A quick google search seems to indicate that Smartscreen is primarily about unsafe web pages, so I'm not sure that would help with loading "office/excel files". I sometimes get very slow loading of certain applications, most often my text editor of choice, gvim. And this is with Kaspersky, not Microsoft anti-virus. Makes me seriously consider running without an anti-virus.
How much Virtual Memory is your windows 10 opened up to or is it system managed? because that can have a significant impact on how fast applications open up. I am using the exact same nvme drive you are its a 1TB. My laptop has a Core I7-10750H, 32GB DDR4, Nvidia RTX2060. I have my virtual memory opened to about 5GB its pretty snappy. I would say open up your virtual memory a bit retest the performance of your machine and go from there.
i think the problem is with office files only. office creates a load of crap when you open a file multiple times. it backup same file again and again with date and time you created. so loading might taking long to bring up latest saved file. try to cleanup the office backup files and open again. and also create a standard pagefile.sys (min and max size are same ) instead of dynamic one.