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Running a Windows desktop on a an instance that sits within free tier (which I assume is what is meant by "I have a free account") is going to consume a high proportion of available resources, given it's a t2 or t3.micro (1GB RAM, 1 or 2 vCPU), and only 30GB of general purpose storage.
You're looking in the right places, calculating the EBS IOPS for instance, are you using gp2 or gp3 ? The differences, and advantages of one over the other are here https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/general-purpose.html
Look at AWS Compute Optimiser for recommendations on how to make the most out of your resources https://aws.amazon.com/compute-optimizer/getting-started/
It may end up that you need to uplift to higher-spec instance type, which will almost certainly fall outside the scope of free tier. The additional cost can be mitigated by doing things like stopping (or hibernating) the EC2 when not in use (depending on the instance type and OS) https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-hibernate-your-ec2-instances/
You can continue to use an on-demand instance for this, it doesn't need a reserved instance paid up-front (if that's what you mean by "Do I need to purchase a subscription?").
It's probably also worth mentioning that AWS has an offering for virtual desktops in the cloud called Workspaces https://aws.amazon.com/workspaces/
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Thank you for your reply, it was very useful. Yes, I have the free tier with a t2.micro. I'm currently using gp2. I thought that it wasn't an IOPS problem because I still have 100% on burst balance. Can you confirm this?
I can't confirm your burst balance as I can't see inside your account, but if you say you've got 100% burst balance then it probably isn't your root cause (and BTW my language was sloppy in my last reply, I didn't man that IOPS was the right place to look to solve your problem, what I meant was you were thinking through the right things to look at).
Are there any other metrics in the AWS Console that are pointing towards high resource consumption? Consider installing CloudWatch agent to get a more detailed view of system utilisation metrics https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/monitoring/install-CloudWatch-Agent-commandline-fleet.html