I am a Dataton Watchout user and one thing I did was to set up the production PC with nothing else but Watchout. I didn't even connect it to the Internet and disallowed system updates once it was all working.

What do vMix folks do with their production PCs?

Do you add other production apps like Adobe's Creative Cloud apps or keep it as clean as possible?

Has anyone discovered other apps that degrade the performance of vMix?

I was using Chrome and other streaming software with vMIX before. But later found out that my PC wasn't able to handle streaming and recording simultaneously. Now I close all applications and leave just vMIX on my stream computer. Other than that, this PC is also used for video editing and gaming. No problems whatsoever.

It really depends what you can effort. A seperate system is the optimun. I use Email, Adobe, Unreal Engine, NDI software, Skype, MS Teams and Office, Webex Teams, Browsers ... on the vmix system. Basically the information systems I need kept on it. So far no issues. During a production make sure you close apps that you don't need so don't get calls or chats that is not needed.