Sounds to me like the symptoms of trying to ascertain if windows needs an update - although that should be visible in higher CPU usage of 1 core. The only other throttling could happen to CPU if overheated - if CPU cooler is full of gunk, it might result in cutting back whenever CPU gets hot. Just vacuuming the area is often enough, no need to unscrew a often tightly packed laptop.

I would compare data from resource monitor - on disk the speed reflected for the application trying to start and if many .Net assemblies are virus-checked and/or replaced.

Jot down the times you consider slow and compare with things reflected in system logs if you do not see any MS update/virus check/crypto miner activity in resource monitor on CPU and/or disc.

The only other thing I remember was old discs falling back to PIO, but that should not happen to SATA and/or SSD, as the interface is not applicable AFAIK.
But back then, whenever OS "saw" many disc errors, the speedy access was cut back until reboot of fix in registry.

HTH

thomas

>By now, the following has been collected as far as the issue of slow performance of my laptop after a while.
>
>1. The disk is SSD, so defrag does not apply.
>2. TRIM is ON in the system.
>3. Samsung SSD Magician software cannot run as it reports incompatibility or something like that.
>4. When it happens, CPU is normal, memory is normal, disk is normal
>
>Symtoms are like this.
>
>1. Word takes about 4 times slower to start.
>2. Any click in the browser is slower than average.
>3. Windows update takes longer, usually only updating Defender, would be slower as well
>4. Starting Outlook is slower as well
>
>The only way to make things normal again is a restart.