Windows 10 dead slow opening programs

[ah1g]

Wife's desktop is running window 10. It has a celeron J1800 2.5G processor 4 gig of ram. It has been really slow opening any programs compared to my window 7. I have checked the services and startups and do not see any non essential programs running. It seems that it is always downloading something from the internet in that every time something comes over the ehernet the CPU shoots up to 10% usage. Any idea what it is downloading and could that be what is slowing down the computer? If so how do I limit the downloading?

[Wood Devil]

I bought a laptop a while back with Windows 10 installed on it. It always took ten to fifteen minutes to start up, with all the automatic updates and just gearing up. I gave up. I gave the laptop to my father and then bought a new laptop with Windows 8.1 installed. If I can help it, I'll NEVER buy another computer with W10 on it. In fact, the new desktop my parents have has W10 on it and that takes a while to boot up as well. Horrible operating system. But I guess it takes a bit longer these days for all the alphabet agency spyware to get going during boot.

[Bigfoot]

Herr Walther may have a better idea, but this may help- https://www.safer-networking.org/spybot-anti-beacon/