Well, i looked through services and nothing was disabled or not running for what i needed to do, and in the Event Viewer, the only errors ive been getting recently have been with nmap, which doesnt have anything to do with the apps im running but it does scan for open ports in the background i believe?

And for windows clean up, i may be spacing out a bit here, but is there a windows clean up program or are you saying to just run av, defrag, etc etc?