I mean yeah the specs are minimal but they should be more than adequate for EQ. Do you play fullscreen or in windowed mode? Fire up task manager and sort by CPU usage and see what's consuming your CPU while you're playing (switch EQ to window mode with alt+enter if fullscreen, and make sure it's the active window while task manager is on the side). Your 1% comment is intriguing so I'm hoping you'll see an explanation as to why. My laptop typically throttles down to sub 2GHz while I'm playing, and even then the EQ process will be at 10-20% activity.
Regarding suspicions of malware - you can grab a copy of malwarebytes (the free version works fine, just unclick any of the "pro or premium trial" options and see if that finds anything on a full scan. You can just uninstall it when you're finished with it.
https://www.malwarebytes.com/mwb-download/
You notice your system's fans churning often or constantly? Maybe one of the "pop-up heaven and malware/spyware" was a cryptocoin miner and it'll be easily remedied.
For context this is my work laptop (so I have a ton of other stuff open and running) which is at least 8 years old with only internal graphics, and EQ is running normally and consuming 16% CPU. Note that I haven't done any of the "upgraded" textures or other things that are available on the forums on this laptop: