Houdini hangs/crawls to a stop

I have a laptop, Lenovo Lwgipn Pro 5i with Ultra 9 275HX, 32GB RAM and RTX 5070 Ti

Brand new this June.

I haven't wield much in Houdini on it before, but going away a week on a business trip I thought it's time. And it's not behaving well.

I can't change the UI, or else Houdini will crash. By change ui I mean even just switching to the geometry tab will instantly have Houdini go slow motion for a few sec and then completely ruin performance on the laptop as a whole. Can barely open the start menu.

I am forcing the pc to use the RTX, not Intel GPU. I am plugged in to power.

I am not running discord and have killed nihamic.

Updated GPU drivers.

No clue what to do from here!