First, you have a very old cpu there, so think about just getting a newer computer if at all possible. Even a used one of a newer vintage will be fine. Second, if you can’t do that, hard drives are absurdly slow and SSDs (new digital drives) are very cheap so have that replaced.

Lots of reasons for those random times when it gets very busy and uses 100%, slowing you down. Windows does all manner of things in the background, housekeeping tasks. For instance, it indexes all the files on your drive so you can find them when you search. Chrome updates itself. Windows updates itself. Etc. All those things will improve with a newer faster machine with a faster CPU and SSD.

Finally, don’t have too many browser tabs open at once. The very newest Chrome release shows you how much memory each tab takes, and it’s frightening. Depends on the site, but more than a few take 1GB each (that’s a lot). This will easily exceed your memory, at which time Windows has to use hard drive space for the overflow, and that will slow you down a lot with a spinning hard drive.

OK so cross out the aol email and write in a fax number

OMG you applied for a real grownup job in 2023 with an aol email address?

WHY?

Yes indeed people judge you on email address. I’m not going to argue that this is rational or logical; it isn’t. But you sort of have to go with the flow. I don’t think people with silly email addresses is a protected class at this point, so you can’t fight that particular discrimination. Prejudice. Get a gmail address. It’s excellent and neutral. Keep the other one if you like. You can set up gmail to suck up mail from the other account and put it in your gmail flow. Problem solved! Good luck!