First of all, thank you for the expression effort.
I didn't think I had any deleted partitions or files either but after running
Testdisk, the program was unable to recover some partitions and files so
perhaps there is some corruption.
What do you by "unable to recover some partitions and files". Is there an
error message?
A VPN preserving anonymity could prevent viruses that someone may have put on
your computer if they were able to track you when you didn't have the VPN
though, right? I'm still learning so correct me if I'm wrong.
No, a VPN just hides you identity. Your ISP only sees encrypted messages to
the VPN and the site you connect to talks to the VPN (it does not know you,
unless you authenticate of course) that forwards its message to you. But you
can still end up downloading malicious code (forwarded by the VPN) and a
virus would still be able to communicate with the whole Internet (going
through the VPN), for instance spams would still find their way out if a
Troyan horse infected your system... but you do not have to worry much about
that with GNU/Linux, especially if you only run a desktop system with no
server installed and if you are not an especially interesting target (malware
designed to specifically target you).
I think the highest %CPU was maybe at 50% with all of the combined programs
being open. Typically it's only around 25% total from my observations.
The, there is no problem with the CPU usage.
I just installed it following the directions from the same link you gave me:
https://trisquel.info/en/wiki/install-trisquel-windows-dual-boot-0
You ran that installer from removable media, such as a live CD or a live USB.
If, using that live system (e.g., Abrowser on the live system), there is no
problem, then the problem really relates to you installation. Otherwise,
well, I do not know. Maybe your hardware is not well supported and you can
try to install a newer kernel from https://jxself.org/linux-libre/ or, worse,
your hardware is defective and you can test it (in particular the RAM with
memtest86+, which is in Trisquel's repository).
