HP laptop internet suddenly slowed down

Help me out here, please.
A coworker of mine is using some kind of HP machine at work—it looks pretty new, maybe only a year old, but honestly, it’s acting like a total piece of junk.
Out of nowhere, her internet speeds have just tanked over the last week.
She hasn't been downloading anything sketchy either (just the usual stuff, checking emails, maybe grabbing an image or two),

and lately, she can barely even load a single webpage, or if she does, it takes like five minutes...

It doesn't matter which browser she tries to use, too.

On top of that, I'm seeing this message about an HP recovery disk being full, even though she hasn't actually triggered a system restore or anything once. So, there isn't a single system restore point available.

😵

There's almost nothing on her C or D drives, maybe like 2% usage, and I've already uninstalled basically every useless program I could find... just left the bare essentials.

What do you think is going on, and is there anything specific in the hardware specs I should be looking at?

Try running CCleaner, Malwarebytes, whatever antivirus you’ve got installed, HitmanPro, JRT, and AdwCleaner—just use all those tools to scan the PC and scrub everything out. Once that's done, check back to see if things actually look any different...

Ran CCleaner and Malwarebytes twice... came up totally empty handed.
I was actually trying to get AVG set up, but... I couldn't even get halfway through because my internet crawled to such a pathetic snail's pace that everything just froze right in the middle of the download/install process.

Which OS are we talking about here? It’s possible that a massive Windows update is running in the background—that could definitely be why your internet feels sluggish. Are you seeing slow loading times on websites, or is the whole computer just stuttering and freezing up? Also, does this happen only while you're browsing, or is it happening all the time regardless of what you're doing?

I’d go so far as to bet that Windows 10 is the real culprit here; it’s likely pulling down some massive update in the background without even giving you a heads-up, which would definitely explain why your internet feels like it's crawling at a snail's pace.