Laptop extremely slow on startup and Possible CPU issue.

[Marcin79]

I ordered this laptop for my son in 2020 and the warranty has since expired. About one month ago, the laptop in question started to take a very long time to startup, log in, and open apps. Me and my other son concluded that there was no virus on the computer and that the probable cause was too many apps and game launchers opening on startup and the high ram usage from Google Chrome. He switched to Firefox, changed startup settings and everything worked well for a month. Yesterday and Today, similar issues began occurring with the current settings. Even the launcher for the game War Thunder claimed that the CPU was too slow to boot the launcher (the laptop uses a Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-10750H CPU @ 2.60GHz processor with 16GB of RAM.) He has played the game many times before with no issue, leading me to believe there might be a CPU issue. Another game he had, EA FC24, would also download updates, but would constantly fail to launch whenever he pressed play in the EA launcher. We both have a lingering suspicion that Microsoft Flight Simulator, a 150 GB giant that demands heavy GPU and RAM usage, might be responsible, despite it not being opened for months.

Furthermore, download speed for the War Thunder's updates was going from a few megabytes per second to a couple hundred bits, and my internet has a download speed of 68 MB/s. This slow speed was also the case for many diagnostic tests and scans, even after the computer was running for a while. This leads me to my next point. Even if the download and scan speeds on the laptop remain slow, after about ~20 minutes after startup, the PC starts running much faster and smoother.

I am led to believe that the laptop has a hardware or software problem that leads to a very slow running rate when starting up and for several minutes after. If anyone knows any ways to fix this, I would greatly appreciate it.

[erico]

in the search box, type in startup and click on Startup Apps in the list that appears above.

You will now be able to see what apps are opening on startup and disable some to see the effect that it has.

You can also use the Task Manager Processes tab to see what apps are taking up CPU cycles while the laptop is running.

I use an app called RaMMap, which is considerably more powerful, to do that and disable apps and services that I am certain that should not be running.  That is where you can find "bad actors and  verify that by searching for them on the internet in the RaMMap utlity..
RaMMap is a Microsoft System Internals app that generally is only used by enthusiasts. Be careful while using it.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/rammap