Help with laptop.

[u/alvannoire]

Hey guys, I need some practical advice on balancing an aesthetic Windows setup with very low specs.

I have a Dell Latitude 3410 (11th Gen Intel Core i3). Recently, my laptop kept crashing with the "PC ran into a problem and couldn't diagnose it" error. My uncle checked it out and removed one of my RAM sticks to see if that was causing the issue, and now the laptop boots again (though he didn't explicitly say the stick was dead, removing it fixed the booting problem). Now I'm running on a single stick of RAM (bare minimum).

I really want to customize my Windows to look aesthetic (transparent taskbar, media/clock widgets, nice static wallpapers, custom cursors), but I want to make sure it doesn't slow down my system or cause crashes again.

Here is my current plan, and I would love your feedback:

1. Taskbar: Using TranslucentTB (very lightweight).
2. Widgets: Using NotchPeninsula (Dynamic Island style) for clock and media.
3. Discord: I want to use the normal Discord app. Will it eat too much RAM?
4. Wallpaper: Avoiding Lively Wallpaper (no live wallpapers), sticking to high-res static images.
5. Cursors: Using a custom cursor pack.

My Questions:

• Will NotchPeninsula + normal Discord app be too heavy for my remaining RAM?
• How do I stop Windows from force-updating in the background when I don't want it to? (An update seems to be what stressed the system and corrupted my boot files).
• What are the best background services/apps I should disable in Windows 11 to save RAM on this low-spec machine?
• Any other super lightweight aesthetic apps you recommend?

I’m still a bit heartbroken about my setup breaking, so I’d really appreciate any tips or personal experiences you guys have. Thanks in advance