New computer slooooow...

[ChrisJakarta]

I've been asked to look at a brand-new Samsung AMD netbook with Windows 7/64 Home Premium installed. Initially it was taking a whole ten minutes to boot. I know netbooks are often slow, but that's crazy! Got the boot time down to a reasonable time by removing Norton stuff using the Norton Removal Tool, replaced with MSE. But it still freezes every few minutes. Just to get a directory can take minutes. CPU is not red-lining, mostly 10-20%. But the disk light is on continually, and I mean on, not just flashing. There are a few other unnecessary programs I'd like to remove, particularly Windows Live Essentials, but it took more than one hour to remove 15% of one of the 'Essentials", so I gave up.

I've scanned with MSE and Malwarebytes, these seem to run reasonably normally, and no problems found.

I'm at a loss. What could cause this continual disk access?

Any ideas gratefully appreciated...

Chris

[HansV]

Can you see which processes are using most of the CPU time? The Windows Search Indexer is often busy after Windows starts, and this causes a lot of disk access.

[ChrisJakarta]

Thanks for the thought, Hans. Can't check it at the moment, but from memory there were no particularly processes taking any significant portion of the time. And also the problem goes on continually for hours, not just at startup. Just to get the task manager to display can take minutes...

Chris

[viking33]

Slow, freezing on a brand new laptop?
Bad HD? Whatever, I would return it to the seller and exchange for another one.
JMHO.

[ChrisJakarta]

Bob,

MHO as well. And luckily that of the owner, who agreed to return it today. Only trouble is I won't find out what caused this.

BTW, I did run diskcheckup.exe on this computer; this didn't show up anything obvious. Also the Disk section of the Resource Monitor looked normal (to my inexperienced eyes). There did seem to be some funny errors in the Event Viewer, but I couldn't interpret them.

Chris

[ChrisJakarta]

Update: John Lewis exchanged this computer with a nice little Acer Aspire, no questions asked. Now setting this up, and finding it much less frustrating!

Chris

[viking33]

Update: John Lewis exchanged this computer with a nice little Acer Aspire, no questions asked. Now setting this up, and finding it much less frustrating!

Chris

Good news!
Who needs frustration these days?