Why is my laptop so slow

It may be that you are running out of disk space. To find out, open file explorer and then click on This PC. You should see a status bar of the hard drive indicating the amount of disk space used and unused, if the status bar is red then this shows that the hard drive is getting full. Right click on the status bar and you can see a pie chart graphic, if the drive is getting full then you can right click and select disk clean up to delete temp files, internet temp files and similar. The pause of a few seconds is consistent with low disk space as the operating system uses a virtual memory file stored on the hard drive and has to write and read smaller blocks of data.