Slowness and high memory usuage

For a computer which as served me well and until run softwares such as Adobe illustrator and After Effects without a hitch recently its been struggling to do simple tasks such as opening the file explorer or previewing pictures without crashing. Memory usuage sits at around 35% when nothing is in use and a lot higher when softwares are in use. I originally thought it may be a hardware issue but I struggle to see how when it was perfectly fine until recently. Malware is the only option I can...

Slowness and high memory usuage