A hard drive is a common cause of "the slows" in that model. Most 2012 MacBook Pros have mechanical hard drives that make them feel slow.
Most drives in that model were under-specced from Day One, considering the logic board's speed potential. Mech drives can also slow as they age. A ten-minute boot time implies a failing hard drive and/or a serious infection of worthless third-party anti-virus, security, or so-called "cleaning" apps. Those are Mac killers.
There is also a possible slow performance issue with an inexpensive, user-replaceable part—the hard drive cable. It is subject to wear from normal vibration of use and transport. The wear, that can mimoc a failing hard drive, can show up in as few as 3-5 years.
Given those potential issues, for us to see hard data on your computer's current condition we need a snapshot of the systme configuration. Fortunately there is a safe, secure way to do that.
We can quickly and within the confines of these forums help you determine what issues are at play if you use EtreCheck Pro, available here:
https://etrecheck.com/index
The free version will do nicely for this purpose, although the app is worthy of our financial support.
We can see hard data about drive performance, software issues, and RAM usage. Etrecheck is the development of a long-serving and trusted contributor here expressly for displaying diagnostic information in these forums to help us help you. It will not reveal any personal or secure information. Many issues have been resolve din one post here beacsue and EtreCheck report was included.
The report will be too long to post by copy/paste. To post the entire report here, please follow this instructions in this User Tip:
How to use the Add Text Feature When Post… - Apple Community