Brand new laptop performing like an old one

[phooten58]

A few weeks ago I purchased a Dell Inspiron 15 7000 series for gaming and school work. From the start, it performed great but was plagued with occasional spikes of lag both in games and out of them. Programs (Chrome, Word, and a variety of games) will randomly freeze and become unresponsive for a period of a few seconds. Since then, the problem has gotten progressively more frequent and lasts for longer periods of time (still seconds however). The computer has never crashed, and I don’t get the notification that a program has stopped responding prompting me to close the program, it’s just brief pauses almost. Also since then overall performance has decreased, things navigating file windows, opening the start menu, and searching for things take forever. On chrome it takes forever to launch, open a new tab, or even scroll down a page. Many apps become unresponsive as soon as I try to interact with them (opening menus, opening new tabs etc) I have I’ve run antivirus tests, checked for corrupt files, defragged my drive, changed power settings, deleted apps, and pretty much anything else I could find on the internet to try and solve this problem to no avail. All scans and tests show that nothing is wrong. And as far as performance goes, in the periods between spikes it performs wonderfully and handles games exactly how I want it to, but the spikes are not only annoying but often get me killed in game, or make me want to kill something while trying to do my homework.

-8GB DDR4
-Intel Core i5 7th Gen
-Nvidia Geforce GTX 1050 4GB

 

[zer0c007]

1. Does it perform the same on battery as well as direct power from wall socket?
2. Check windows updates, see if any updates are very recent enough that coincide with lagging issues. If there are not the KB....names of those windows files and then remove those updates from your pc, or remove one by one and see if the situation rectifies itself. If it does work then investigate the problem windows update and find exactly what it does and see if really a required update. It does not mean windows updates are an absolute necessity unless it deals with security fixes, hot fixes that is important for windows to communicate correctly with the hardware.
3. Finally check for bios updates and driver updates. With regard to bios updates I would avoid updates from within windows but use facilities present within the bios itself for updating using either a usb or cd and some command prompt savvy this is the best method while some manufacturers will make easier without needing to use command prompt but the update is done without booting into windows, this how you update the bios correctly. Running update from within windows can require the laptop suddenly develop odd fan speeds, loss in screen quality etc, from my experience.
5. Run chkdsk and pay attention bad sectors report, sometimes windows will report no problems with OS but can still find bad sectors which some miss since its clearly defined in the report so check that.
6. If all above fails then it may be some faulty software so remove non essential software and test.
7. Also when gaming, use only when connected to main power instead battery and set power options high performance.