New Asus laptop is slow

[Stelline]

Hi, I have an Asus X551M running Windows 8 that's less than a month old and it is sloooooow. Web browsing is a little slower than I'd like but marginally acceptable - running anything else is just stupidly slow. I've changed the power option to high-performance, removed as much of the bloatware as I could, and the laptop is still very slow. The laptop I had previously (HP Pavilion g6) was nowhere near this slow and it was older and not as (theoretically) powerful. What gives? Am I screwed, or is there a way to make the Asus run like... well, like it's a new computer?

 

[Deleted member 1697763]

You may want to do a virus scan with malwarebytes and also defrag your HDD to start off with.

 

[Stelline]

You may want to do a virus scan with malwarebytes and also defrag your HDD to start off with.

Malwarebytes reports no problems, HDD defragmented. No noticeable change, computer still stupidly slow.

 

[Deleted member 1697763]

What is running at startup?

 

[Stelline]

What is running at startup?

Nothing out of the ordinary.
To be more specific: Avast, Hamachi (for gaming), Skype, hkcmd module, and igfxtray module. Everything else I disabled (like the Asus Product Register program and Google Update).

 

[Deleted member 1697763]

Avast is a massive resource hog so if you can, try installing something like kaspersky. Also, is your hard drive OK? Try running some SMART info checkers and post what it says

 

[Stelline]

Avast is a massive resource hog so if you can, try installing something like kaspersky. Also, is your hard drive OK? Try running some SMART info checkers and post what it says

Okay so, I switched antiviruses (I saw several lists that said Avira was good and not a resource hog), and the SMART info checker says that everything's good. Computer still slow. Maybe a tiny bit less slow, but still way too slow for a computer that's less than a month old.

 

[Deleted member 1697763]

Okay so, I switched antiviruses (I saw several lists that said Avira was good and not a resource hog), and the SMART info checker says that everything's good. Computer still slow. Maybe a tiny bit less slow, but still way too slow for a computer that's less than a month old.

OK, is this just when opening things or does it slow down when doing a specific action on the computer?

 

[Stelline]

Okay so, I switched antiviruses (I saw several lists that said Avira was good and not a resource hog), and the SMART info checker says that everything's good. Computer still slow. Maybe a tiny bit less slow, but still way too slow for a computer that's less than a month old.

OK, is this just when opening things or does it slow down when doing a specific action on the computer?

It's pretty much consistently slow all the time. Web browsing is slow, opening a program (any program) is slow, running a program is slow... I've only installed a couple of games since buying the computer (neither of which are exactly high-resource games), but the computer acts like I've had it for years and made serious attempts at downloading every picture there is on the internet.