I probably have malware but I'm not sure and nothing thus far has removed it if it is there

Hello. I am not very tech savvy at all so I apologize ahead of time for any stupid that may occur.

I believe I have some kind of malware, as my new gaming laptop (an MSI GL65 9SEK running Windows 10) has started running slowly in some specific ways (a few games lag on startup when they didn't before) and when I open my task manager I see my cpu at 100% briefly before it jumps back down to normal usage. I have googled the problem and it seems like this is usually caused by some sort of bitcoin mining malware.

I have followed the pinned malware removal guide to the letter but the problem still occurs. In addition, none of my other programs that have a cpu monitor (Dragon Center, Malwarebytes, Norton to name some) seem to even recognize the high usage. I have seen a couple suggestions to use Process Monitor to find the offending process but I am too dumb to figure out how to use it to that effect.

Am I just paranoid or is this a real issue? Does task manager just do that? It's not really affecting me yet but of course if there is something actually wrong I'd like to know so I can take more steps to fix it without wondering if I'm wasting my time. And also any advice on actually fixing it would be appreciated.