Programs Lagging and Freezing In Safe Mode

So, have a bit of an odd one for you guys. My aunt brought to me a laptop of hers that was running sluggish and sure enough it was a bit slow on startup. So I did the normal thing and ran CCleaner, disabled unnecessary programs and finished with installing some updates (and there was a lot of them, didn't get to an antivirus run through). Then when I had the computer boot back into normal mode the computer was far worse. It would take minutes for things to register.

Finally I booted it back into safe mode but to my surprise, things are almost as bad there. But only sort of. See sometimes it'll allow me to open up a program and run it immediately for it to freeze up and not responding. Other times, programs will again take minutes to finally start up. Heck, explorer itself has stopped responding a couple of times.

So finally I was like, "Okay, she wants Windows 10 on the computer anyways and to have it reset, so let's just go with a Refresh and start from there. Started the process but it stopped saying some error had occurred. Tried resetting and got the same result.

At this point, I'm sort of at a loss and could really use some assistance. Any ideas? Not even entirely sure this is a software related issue but I'm sort of hoping it is as those are easier to fix, and less costly. But the other reason is that things definitely seem far worse after my fixes than before.

 

Oh and, something odd is that in Safe Mode with Networking, the network connection keeps dropping. Not sure if this plays into the above problem but, it's unusual so I thought I'd add it.

 

Yeah it's gotten to the point where I'm fighting with the computer in safe mode and can't do a proper test for malware, though the fact that when it got to me it had an expired antivirus program and nothing else in terms of security, makes me wonder if that's it. Problem is, not sure how to check it when it's so laggy.

 

That where you go to the C drive in computer and check for errors right? I did that in cmd with chkdsk and it was popping out a some errors. How do you do that with Windows 8.1? go into cmd and choose chkdsk c:\?

 

Tried using a generic tool and it won't work. And the WD one is saying it's the wrong version, although I downloaded the one for Windows. The generic chkdsk test did say there were errors though, don't know if I mentioned that. Couldn't load any reports because the computer is in pretty bad shape.