@BDAqua - Additional information re: Drives - as suspected above - ran EtreCheck today and I received the "hard drive appears to be failing result". Below is the information about my drives as of today, so there is a variance of 2.29 available GB and free. This could be email, this could be related to Avast being reinstalled the other day, but I checked my system after re-install and it was fine. I just realized I did enable load the VPN from the package and this could account for the variance, but completely uninstalled their PW program since I don't have any use for it (all installer packages were also trashed and emptied). I have performed first aid on my drives and every time it comes up fine. I think this is a space issue rather than a failure of my drive. Even this variance of 2.29 GB affected performance. Unfortunately, I got nailed with a huge bill from Avast in October, well above and beyond the price I expected to pay and did not realize how much they charged me until after I noticed there was a software conflict with the version I was running, and they refused to reimburse me 2 weeks outside their parameters even though they renewed my license several weeks ahead of time. It is a losing battle with them, as most ppl already know, but I digress. I realize Apple has security built in but it does not cover email for Outlook (malware attachments), malware infected site alerts, etc. (if I am wrong please educate me here. - no sarcasm intended at all).
Drives:
disk0 - APPLE HDD ST1000DM003 1.00 TB (Mechanical - 7200 RPM)
Internal SATA 3 Gigabit Serial ATA
disk0s1 - EFI (MS-DOS FAT32) [EFI] 210 MB
disk0s2 [APFS Container] 1000.00 GB
disk1 [APFS Virtual drive] 1000.00 GB (Shared by 4 volumes)
disk1s1 -Primary (APFS) (Shared - 891.81 GB used)
disk1s2 - Preboot (APFS) [APFS Preboot] (Shared)
disk1s3 - Recovery (APFS) [Recovery] (Shared)
disk1s4 - VM (APFS) [APFS VM] (Shared - 8.59 GB used)
Mounted Volumes:
disk1s1 -Primary
1000.00 GB (Shared - 891.81 GB used, 104.02 GB available, 96.96 GB free)
APFS
Mount point: /
disk1s4 - VM [APFS VM]
1000.00 GB (Shared - 8.59 GB used, 96.96 GB free)
APFS
Mount point: /private/var/vm