I bought an HP Pavilion laptop very recently. It has Windows 8, and arrived in the mail not more than a week ago. The first thing I did after the obligatory setup process was to restore the files from my old laptop (which broke) via ClickFree (currently I have 625 of 677GB free), and once that was completed, I installed several programs (Office, Vipre, Photoshop, etc.). Apart from that, I have done very little to the actual hard drive of the computer, since I save everything externally on my ClickFree.
My problems started occurring rather suddenly, early Wednesday morning. In Firefox, I opened a tab to go to Facebook, and scrolling through the news feed seemed rather sluggish. I closed the tab, but the sluggishness continued in the other tabs I had open, and then spread to programs not involving the Internet. These problems have gradually worsened.
On the Internet, performance is especially slow. I have given up on video players like Netflix, since they freeze the browser to the point of crashing. Loading pages is extremely delayed, even typing this message experiences freezes, despite the fact that I have nothing else running in the browser. There are frequent messages warning of unresponsive plugins and scripts (though ironically, these messages often become unresponsive before I can end the offending plugin or script). It is difficult to actually do anything on the Internet, as loading pages and switching tabs can take many minutes. Just clicking can cause the browser to freeze for minutes at a time.
Off the Internet, programs load extremely slowly, often freezing. Opening folders sometimes, with increasing frequency, results in a green loading bar at the top of the screen. Sometimes this bar gets stuck and cannot finish, and I cannot access the contents of the folder; this happened while I tried to open Control Panel, to get more specific information about the computer to include in this message. Sometimes programs, like video players, open without actually playing the video file, or they don't open at all. Often these programs freeze, and sometimes crash; the desktop and the explorer bar at the bottom of the screen (with the Start menu, etc.) are not unlikely to freeze or disappear altogether, for varying degrees of time. When I first got the computer, CPU usage averaged around 4-6%, but now it averages 40-60%.
Starting up the computer has also become difficult and time-consuming. The last time I restarted, I entered my login password only to be granted a completely black screen for at least half an hour; my desktop and icons only appeared when I pressed control-alt-delete. After that, I stopped turning off the computer (this was not long ago). This morning, I opened the laptop to log in, but was only given a "please wait" while the computer tried to load the login page. This took ten-fifteen minutes, and then I was finally able to enter my password.
These issues are only getting worse, and I'm sure I am forgetting several, but I believe what I have included is sufficient to illustrate my problem. This is a brand new laptop, but it runs almost as poorly as my old laptop, which became unusable recently and had to be replaced with this one. I can't imagine what is causing this, but I would really love to have it fixed. I installed a program called Fix-It Utilities (the installation disc came with the laptop) to try to improve the laptop's performance, but to no avail. Any help would be greatly appreciated.