Programs running in the background

[Gene Wharton]

I have an Intel Pentium 2.41 Ghz dual core processor. 4 gigs of memory and a 64 bit Operating system. My problem is that my computer reacts so slowly. Many times when watching a video it will pause and the little circle will appear in the middle of the screen and just go round and round. I have a cable modem and have ran speed tests and get 25Mbps to 60Mbps download speeds. To me this seems the 25 reading is out of line. I'm wondering if it is being slowed down by programs running in the background. If I open Task Master, it will show that I have around 58-61 background processes running and around 30 Windows 10 processes running. Is this normal? If not which ones can I "end task" and if I do, do I need to start them somehow the next time I need them, if I need them at all? I have ran scans with Norton's and Malware Bytes and found no viruses. Help!! My smart phone reacts quicker on Facebook when going from the "notification list" to a Facebook page.

 

[Trouble]

You might want to try clean booting your system as described here
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/929135

Easily done, easily undone.
Basically you're just disabling all the Startup Items and All non-Microsoft services.
Be sure to check the box to hide Microsoft Services, as you don't want to accidentally disable any of those.

After configuring your machine to Clean Boot, if that seems to provide any relief from the problem, you will then have to take some time and determine what the offending program, service / process might be.

Carefully and deliberately one non-Microsoft service at a time or in very small groups re-enable them, rebooting after each change to observe any changes. Then graduate to the Startup items again rebooting after each change.
Understanding that in some cases, a Startup item may have a non-microsoft service associated with it and as a result you may not notice the impact until both the Startup item and the service are re-enabled.