I have just bought a Windows 10 laptop for my wife.
I don't know if it is random updates or junkware or whatever, but sometimes the system will lock out for minutes - task manager shows <50% of load on any of disk, ram and cpu, but even waiting for task manager to launch can take a minute!
I've witnessed a simple program (FAR manager) taking a minute to show its UI!
Try turning off all of the malware and search features. Windows defender will run on every file, folder, or executable you touch. Play a movie with VLC? Here let us scan VLC, every DLL it depends on, every file you have opened with it, and the entire file you are about to open. They also bundled Cortana and Bing with search, which means you can get ads in your search! But also means it makes like twenty web queries every time you search. Also search indexes like non-stop for no reason I can fathom, which is a shame because I actually liked the windows 7 search features (which are now bundled with this ad serving, resource hogging, shit).
Also, don't trust task manager, it lies about utilization if you aren't running as admin and don't have it configured correctly.
Windows defender is by far the "best" malware software when it comes to having a light footprint. Scanning every byte of IO for malware signatures, and the ton of other heavyweight operations are a sure way to eat a ton of processing power. I have a under powered win10 tablet, and I have to remind myself to "disable" windows defender every time it goes to install an update. Otherwise what should be a 2-3 minute operation can run for 10-15 mins.
Yea I don't have a problem with it per se, I just wish it implemented any sort of improvement to reduce the hard-drive usage. Say, integrating with the OS to read the same memory as the program will (rather than reading it 2+ times: this kills the drive). Or perhaps storing a list - with hashes - of already scanned files, so it doesn't scan the entire 30+ GB windows dev kit every time I open a large project in visual studio (especially egregious because it forgets it already scanned it when I open a different IDE or say... compiler). The thing is out of control.
Yeah, I've been out of the Windows game for some years now, but my wife has a few (desktop and laptop), occasionally comes to me and says "it's slow. fix it." And indeed it is slow, even on moderate browser use -- things just hang. Specs are more than adequate.
I have to say (after halfheartedly looking into it a few times): "Um, sorry honey, I have no idea. Guess it's a Windows thing." She nods, and goes back to patiently waiting minutes for the browser to stop hanging! Seems that people using Windows just accept this kind of thing as a given, to the point they don't even notice it. (I've installed Linux for her a few times, but of course, it's too different, doesn't run Photoshop, etc...)
I don't know if it is random updates or junkware or whatever, but sometimes the system will lock out for minutes - task manager shows <50% of load on any of disk, ram and cpu, but even waiting for task manager to launch can take a minute! I've witnessed a simple program (FAR manager) taking a minute to show its UI!