Should just use Linux, tbh.
Your work laptop may have company spyware on it. That will drag down the performance of the system, especially if it is monitoring absolutely everything.
It doesn’t. I bought it with a company credit card and I don’t let IT touch it. I gotta do a lot of stuff in the field so I don’t have time to call IT every time I need to install a software update update.
The File Explorer behavior is something I’ve been noticing lately. I do have a number of cloud accounts connected for work, 2 One Drive, 1 dropbox, with a shit ton of files and folders (most not sync’d locally) and I wonder if File Explorer is looking through those when it opens.
Probably the cloud syncing then. That’s always something that hurts performance. It would take investigating to find out what exactly is doing it.
Note: I’ve used OneDrive, Dropbox, and Nextcloud, and historically, all these services take up a good chunk of resources… Windows, Mac, Linux, you name it. I’ve tried it on them all.