bad perfromance on HDD/Windows 10

soo..recently i reinstalled windows 10 to run away from bad performance..here i am
things what i have done so far. disabled defender and search/cortana
and i still end up with dips of performance with hdd usage and ram usage..omg
right now i am using 49% ram and without anything open i use 40% of ram, that is 1,5 GB..that is too much for a fresh install.
my specs
i5 6200U
Nvidia Gforce 940M
4Gb DDR3 ram
1tb WD hard drive
but performance is amazing when i play cpu and ram dependent games. far cry 4 60fps on low/medium. need for speed most wanted 2012 60fps medium and Leauge of legends 80Fps everything high without Anti-aliasing.(I know this is not gaming laptop, but still..impressive numbers)

How can i push more out of my laptop? i want to decrease ram usage and decrease number of apps and programs using hdd all the time. please help me
mind one thing..this is fresh install, i want to get rid of windows cr^pware too

SSD would be your next step.

Simple, get more RAM, 4 GB is just not enough. 8 GB minimum these days.

My simple reasoning goes like this, 1.7 GB Windows 10(at idle) and up to 1.7 GB for the iGPU that leaves very little for Applications in a worse case scenario, barely 500 MB.

Thus you can see that getting up to 8 GB gives you 0.5 GB < 4.5 GB for applications.

This stops most swops to HDD/SSD due to lack of RAM.

4 years ago when buying this Laptop I specified 8 GB of RAM, minimum.

Large SSDs are expensive relative to a 1 TB HDD. That will change over time of course as SSDs come down in price. However it still does not negate the basic lack of RAM.

SSD and RAM upgrade to 16GB if M.2 NVMe is supported, don't hesitate to get one over SATA