Not, specifically but the article mentions at the end that the original laptops used for the win10 transition were using HD's (aka spinning rust) rather than SS

Not, specifically but the article mentions at the end that the original laptops used for the win10 transition were using HD's (aka spinning rust) rather than SSDs because it was a lowest bidder situation. Given what I've seen of corp/gov IT, it wouldn't surprise me in the least if the "security software" (aka virus scanners, intrusion detection, etc) then proceeds to hammer the disk/CPU sufficiently that the machine cannot make forward progress. My wife's work machine (a fairly nice, if slim dell) sits there with one of its 4 cores at 100% running a McAfee process hammering the disk doing some kind of scan pretty much 100% of the time. The result is that it pushes that core to max turbo, overheats the system and then throttles the whole thing to ~800Mhz. It then takes a minute or two to open word/etc. And that is with a fairly fast SSD, add in the spinning rust, and i'm sure it would take much longer. And of course its locked down sufficiently that its not possible to even try and fix it.