Stripping down Windows 10

[shoutingsteve]

A little background:  I bought a budget laptop with windows 10 to use as a lighting controller for DMX lighting.  All is fine as long as nothing else is running on the machine... including the auto-updates, auto downloads, auto scans, auto-bullcrap.  Windows 10 has so many auto features on it that by the time I open the laptop up every few months to use it for a show, I can't do anything with it as it is certainly updating something or another.  Can I modify any of the services (disable during startup or the like) or anything to lighten up the processor load?

I can't boot into safe mode, by the way, as I need to still be able to run my controller software.

[Bitter]

What's the lighting control software specifically and which laptop is this? I'm curious if maybe a more user friendly version of Linux could be a suitable solution to your problem. Some Windows softwares can be ran just fine in Linux with a minor bit of sorcery.

[shoutingsteve]

Oh! good idea!

I use two softwares: Obsidian Onyx and ETC Eos

I also use google drive to sync the show files but I would be willing to do a USB method instead if it solved my problem.

[Bitter]

Alright, post what laptop model it is, we can see if it'll run Ubuntu or something and if that software works.