I've been running Handbrake and a video AI upscaler 24/7. Handbrake sucks up most of the CPU, while the upscaler uses the GPU. While all this is going on, I'm still able to do other stuff like run several browsers with lots of tabs, watch videos, etc. There's some slowdown, but it's tolerable. But the start menu and some other windows features are giving me fits. E.g., for several hours at a time the start button stops working. And CTRL+SHIFT+ESC stops working. (Edit: the show desktop button and Win+D shortcut stop working, too). I tried a couple of start menu replacements (Start8 or something like that, and Revivesomethingorother). But what I really need isn't a start menu replacement, but a start menu ALTERNATIVE. Something I can start from a shortcut on my desktop, uses minimal resources, but also recreates the functionality of the start menu without a lot of setup work. Mostly I just want it to gather ALL the shortcuts in the start menu (they're all over the place in the Windows directory structure and I can't find half of them) and ALL of my pinned tiles (I have no idea where Windows stores them). Any ideas?
You're looking at the problem from the wrong side. Just set the priority of tasks properly to have a responsive GUI, no matter what's running in background