Windows 10 running slow

Hey everyone... so I just finished installing Windows 10 about a month ago, but I grabbed my laptop to test it out a couple of weeks back and man... it feels way slower than the Windows 7 setup I was running before. I’ve seen some threads floating around with tips on how to speed things up, so I tried disabling some background apps, but honestly, I'm hesitant to kill everything because I have no clue what half of those processes actually do... plus, my startup list isn't even that crowded. It's not like it's completely unusable, but you know the feeling... it just drags. Especially right after the login screen—it just sits there stuck on Loading forever after I put in my password, and then the sluggishness just follows me through the rest of my session. Windows 7 felt like a literal rocket compared to this... anyone else dealing with this kind of lag, or is it just me...? 🤔

Man, those updates this past week have been rough. It could easily be a glitch, unless you’ve picked up some kind of virus or malware along the way.

Sent from my >

Man, before that virus hit... I don't even know... probably those updates, for sure... everything's just dragging and running so slow now...

Try clicking the Start button in the corner and just type in "Disk Cleanup"—then select your C: drive. A little window should pop up, so go ahead and click on "Clean up system files" and pick the C: drive once more. Just hang tight while that progress bar finishes loading... once it's done, check all the boxes and hit clean. After that, give your computer a quick restart and see if things look any different.

If you really want to be thorough, though, you might want to run a scan with Malwarebytes or AdwCleaner—just to make sure there isn't some nasty bit of malware hiding in there somewhere...

Tried running Disk Cleanup, but I'm still stuck staring at that damn
screen forever every time I boot up. Ran scans with Malwarebytes and AdwCleaner too, but nothing... just nothing.
Is it actually worth doing that disk cleaning thing more often? And does Disk Cleanup just grab all the useless junk without touching my actual stuff... you know, like my programs or documents?

What kind of specs are we looking at here? Is this the same machine that handled Windows 7 without breaking a sweat, or something else entirely?

Dell Ideapad Z575

Intel Core i3 Processor with Radeon HD graphics 1.90 GHz
RAM 4.00 GB ( 3.47GB usable)
64 byte

It’s the exact same laptop I had before, and honestly... it ran so smooth back when I was using Windows 7. Just gave it a quick restart and now? Feels like it might actually be running better than before... maybe...