I was asked last week by a neighbour to help them with their HP laptop that had become unbearably slow.
Windows Update/Store updates and HP updates were all incredibly painful to download/install often freezing up. The Windows UI (start bar etc) would lock up when you clicked on anything, and yet as the laptops used by their kid only, there was almost no apps installed.
I tried 3 HP factory resets, but each time as soon as the HP tool started loading the 3rd party tools, I could see it start. In analysis I could see I/O was the issue, with the HD being hammered by system processes. But the hardware passed every (offline) test I could run.
Eventually, I abandoned HPs recovery and installed a stock v1903 Windows build. The machine is now much more responsive.
So my question here - Does HP ever provide an update to the Recovery partition ? It will install a really old build of Windows 10, that immediately, as of 1903 would be unsupported. I couldn't see anything in the support utility to do so. Whilst I have the knowledge to be able to download a WIndows 10 ISO, build a USB stick and get windows to boot from it, my neighbours wouldn't know. But they could in future follow F11 -> Reset PC. But only if its actually up to date.
I'm pretty convinced it was one of the the 3rd party bloatware that HP added to the build, maybe McAfee thats probably not compatible with some update. But theres no choice not to install all that rubbish (that's instantly out of date).