Excessive boot time and sporadic 'stalling' during normal operation

Hi
I've a Sony Viao laptop i5-3230M, 8GB RAM which originally came with Win7 pre-installed. I took the plunge to upgrade to Windows 10 Home (currently version 1903 (OS Build 10.0.18362.900) whilst it was available. Since then, 'cold' boot times of > 10 mins are not unusual and once running, Windows periodically stalls for several seconds during which time applications freeze whilst the OS is busy doing something. I've updated drivers, disabled all non-essential applications on startup, disabled anti-virus software but nothing seems to make any difference.

One thing I have noticed is that Performance Monitor indicates a spike in HDD activity during the 'frozen' periods, and the processes appearing to be responsible are \System32 processes referencing wofcompresseddata. Some cursory investigation has revealed that updates like mine typically result in Windows running from compressed files, which therefore require 'dynamic' decompression to operate. I'm tempted therefore to decompress my \System32 folder to see if it improves performance (there is 500GB free on the HDD) but I'm anxious to hear of anyone's successfully done this, or would advise for/against giving it a try...

Many thanks

Hi & thanks for the response

[1] Have you got any other HDD's attached?
No, just the HDD

[2] Are the folders or files in Windows Explorer BLUE?
Actually no, but irrespective of that, I know that compression is being applied from the results of running C:>compact and also as evidenced by wofcompresseddata being referenced against system tasks in Performance Monitor.

I've tried the scf and chkdsk commands as suggested and will keep my fingers crossed.

Returning to my original question- I assume there's a performance hit each time a system file needs to be used (and isn't already overlayed), so am I correct in assuming that I can safely decompress my system32 folder (for example) to avoid this overhead?

Many thanks, again