@smilelikemiles You don't need to worry about your graphics driver or the computer's page file usage. Neither of these looks like a current issue.
For the antivirus, the point is to test playing with it disabled, not to get rid of it. As long as you only open Origin and Sims 4 while it's disabled, your computer should be safe. (And you can quit the game and reenable the antivirus as soon as you see the results.) If you see signs of a virus with the antivirus disabled, the virus was already there—neither Origin nor Sims 4 is going to allow malware to download. If this doesn't help, we move on to other possible causes. If this does help, the question then becomes which settings you need to change to keep it from interfering with Sims 4.
The clean boot may look intimidating, but all it really involves is clicking a few boxes, then restarting your computer. Going through the Task Manager's background processes list should only take a minute or two. It only takes a few seconds to set Origin to launch Sims 4 in windowed mode, and another few seconds to check the Task Manager while the game is loading.
I understand this process can feel quite involved, but the thing is, you've already tried the simple fixes and they haven't helped long-term. The goal here is still to identify a problem that can be addressed once and then never again, or at least not again for a long time. It's the process of finding that problem that can take some work.
Idk how to disable it as I haven’t done it in a while. It’s also intimidating bc I don’t even know what some of the stuff on task manager is so how do I know what to check and what to leave unchecked? I’m not computer smart so it looks confusing to me.
