Lots of problems with laravel 9 upgrade--

So, I am not really sure if this is an environment issue or something else, but I've been fighting with this stupid upgrade for the last 3 days and frankly, I'm at a lost of what to do. First I upgraded php to 8 which resulted with a problem with Laragon (like xampp, but usually easier to manage)

So I upgraded that, and decided to move the install to a different drive as my c drive was getting full.

So mysql, php, and i think composer all run from laragon/bin

I have my path system variables set up to reflect the new drive. https://imgur.com/a/MFFiINa

Struggled getting composer to recognize php 8 even though that was being displayed in php storm, it still showed 7.4 But i finally got that going.

I think I finally have all my packages loaded with no shown errors, but since doing this upgrade, migrations have been taking 10 minutes or more to run when it used to be no more than a few minutes. (and from what ive been reading, even that seems slow for a relatively small data set, no more than 1000 records on any given table.

So I dont know if I am missing something in my configurations, or if its a hard drive limitation, or something else. Not sure how to go about testing things one way or another.

I've spent all day today figuring out issues with the migrations and seeds to see if perhaps that was causing the slowness, but it seems to take a good 20-30 seconds just to start the first transaction. But I did come across errors in which i referenced a users table foreign key for example but only had it as "user"

But all those seeds worked before when they probably shouldn't have. So either Laravel 9 is checking things that it didn't before, or something else is happening.

I even tried doing a mysql dump, but get this error: The command "mysql --user="${:LARAVEL_LOAD_USER}" --password="${:LARAVEL_LOAD_PASSWORD}" --host="${:LARAVEL_LOAD_HOST}" --port="${:LARAVEL_LOAD_PORT}" --database="${:LARAVEL_LOAD_DATABASE}" < "${:LARAVEL_LOAD_PATH}"" failed.

Exit Code: 1(General error)

I cannot work with 10-20 min seed times and all these errors with everything i try to do. I seed a lot of initial data from JSON files, and then i have a few factories as well. It all used to work. Now its been nothing but headache.

How can I determine if this is a hardware or software problem, or perhaps misconfigured path settings?