Constant crashes, lags.

So, first of all I play on steam, whenever i open up the game it takes like a solid minute to load. If i click anywhere it says "path of exile is not responding". And i get a ton of crashes (same way, the screen just freezes and says its not responding) most of the time its in the Hive Fortress which is even more annoying cause it seems i can't even do the league mechanic cause of it. It just seems really annoying to play with the constant crashes, it didnt ever happen like that during my 2k PoE+PoE2 hours combined. Any idea if its just me and what could be causing that? I tried repairing, reinstalling the files. Updating my windows (I'm on 11), updating my graphic drivers, changin from DX12 to 11, to Vulkan etc. I understand my pc specs arent the best but it shouldnt affect it like that.

My pc specs:

i5-11600K
16gb RAM
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060.

Thank you for any help

Let's try to narrow down the possible causes.

Could you perform a Clean Boot in Windows and let us know whether it behaves any better?

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/how-to-perform-a-clean-boot-in-windows-da2f9573-6eec-00ad-2f8a-a97a1807f3dd

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Could I ask whether the game is installed on an SSD or HDD?

(Not trying to play the 'blame game' - just trying to better understand the severity of the issue.)