> It reminds me I recently had a company ship me a laptop with Win on it. I turned it on and logged in and the CPU was just a madhouse with Edge and 2 tabs open. What is the CPU even _doing_??? Does the company mine crypto on company laptops for cash flow... or, what?

Even in a VM, Windows is constantly doing things in the background, whether it's touching the disk, burning CPU cycles, or making network connections. The background services are both numerous and opaque, so who knows what it's actually doing.