ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen12 — browser & WordPress freezes, big performance drop

[liamsmith]

Hi everyone — I’m using a Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen12 (Ultra 5 125H) and running into frustrating performance problems when I work on my website, <website removed> (including the WordPress backend). Whenever I try to edit pages, upload media, or even navigate the WP admin, the browser (Chrome/Edge) will hang for long periods, tabs become unresponsive, and sometimes the whole machine stutters — pages take forever to render, videos embedded on the site stutter, and the fan will spin up even for light tasks. I’ve seen other posts here describing similar freezes and graphics/stutter behaviour on the X1 Carbon Gen12, so I think it’s related to the platform/driver stack rather than my site alone.

What I’ve tried so far: Windows updates, installing the latest Lenovo firmware/BIOS, updating/reinstalling Intel graphics drivers (clean installs), switching power plans (balanced/high performance), testing on battery vs AC, disabling hardware acceleration in the browser, clearing caches, and testing with a fresh user profile and a different browser — but the problem persists. It often looks like a GPU/graphics switching or power-management issue (freeze/stutter tied to certain workloads) rather than a pure WordPress problem, because the whole UI lags and other apps show similar pauses.

Has anyone else using the X1 Carbon Gen12 (or the same Intel integrated GPU setup) seen these exact symptoms when working with WordPress sites or heavy browser-based admin pages? If so, what fixes actually resolved it for you — driver rollback, a specific BIOS setting, driver hotfix, disabling GPU switching, or anything else that reliably stopped the freezes? Any troubleshooting steps or pointers would be much appreciated.