I’ve noticed I have very similar problem. Could you get your friend to check the priority last epoch is set to during start up. Windows task manager → Right click go to details —> Set Priority. Mine auto sets itself to low whenever I launch the game and I’m curious to see if that is the cause for the very slow game start.
That is very odd. Hopefully the devs will see this and double check it… Its not doing it on my setup (win10 via Steam) - its defaulting to Normal.
On loading up times… It takes me 20 seconds from clicking the play button in steam to being able to hit the play button in the launcher and about 5 seconds to enter a game after chosing a character. I am using an NVME drive but still, 5 to 10 minutes is definitely a problem… I dont think even a normal mechanical drive should take that long to load. Makes me think there is something else going on on your friends system.
Unfortunately, based on your information, LE is going to have issues on your system. LE has some way to go with performance optimisation - even on recent and powerful systems - and older systems have much more trouble.
However, even if LE didnt have performance problems, your system is pretty old now (CPU from 2011 & GPU from 2013) and is likely going to struggle. The game can get to 10Gb ram usage very easily. Other than running everything at its lowest possible settings and screen resolution without anything else in running in background, I cannot really offer any other suggestions.