New i7 quad core hp envy with windows 8.1 running so slow!

Hi guys,
always been a windows xp pro and windows 7 enterprise user.
Yesterday I received a brand new HP envy with the fastest i7 quad core processor and windows 8.1.
The good news is that I do not understand people who have difficulty using windows 8.1 because it's so different. The only difference are the apps and the touch screen. Other than that all is the same.

I have one huge problem. Windows 8.1 is so slow it's close to unusable. Programs take 10 seconds or more to load. Boot up is 4 times as long as windows 7. Actually I do not care too much about boot up, because that is only done occasionally.
The fact that programs take for ever to open really annoys me.

You know how older computers take for ever to load stuff? I feel exactly like that.
I am hardwired by Ethernet, I do not trust wireless.
thanks
quo

Hello and welcome!

Since it is new it could be doing a lot of updates in the background and system cleanup which can really slow things down. Is there a lot of hard drive activity and what does Task Manager show? Especially CPU and network activity.

quovadis123 said:

Hi guys,
always been a windows xp pro and windows 7 enterprise user.
Yesterday I received a brand new HP envy with the fastest i7 quad core processor and windows 8.1.
The good news is that I do not understand people who have difficulty using windows 8.1 because it's so different. The only difference are the apps and the touch screen. Other than that all is the same.

Click to expand...

Me either, but I think the majority of people who complain fall into one of four categories: 1) People who've never actually USED Windows 8, but it's the popular thing to do to bash it and 2) People who fear any kind of change, no matter how small; if Microsoft had moved something so much as one pixel, they would run around screaming bloody murder like the world was coming to an end, 3) People who want to have their cake and eat it too, wanting a Windows that is better in every conceivable way to what they have now, but also exactly the same, yet still somehow different enough that it feels fresh and new, just so long as it still looks, feels and operates exactly the same as the last version and 4) People who protest so often and loudly that "overcompensating" barely does it justice. Here in the US we have people who are so insecure about their masculinity they will stick these giant oversized wheels on a truck, where the wheels are about 3/4 as tall as an average person and then do all manner of other customizations to the vehicle which intended to tell the world that what you're packing between your legs is extremely impressive, but ends up doing exactly the opposite.

I have one huge problem. Windows 8.1 is so slow it's close to unusable. Programs take 10 seconds or more to load. Boot up is 4 times as long as windows 7. Actually I do not care too much about boot up, because that is only done occasionally.
The fact that programs take for ever to open really annoys me.

You know how older computers take for ever to load stuff? I feel exactly like that.
I am hardwired by Ethernet, I do not trust wireless.
thanks
quo

Click to expand...

Honestly, it sounds like a bad HDD to me. If you just got the thing yesterday, send it back, demand HP replace it with a new unit under warranty. Windows 8 should be, at a minimum, as fast as Windows 7, but with all the tweaks done under the hood to make Win 8 viable for low end tablet hardware, it should actually be at least noticeably faster than Win 7.

Also, if HP happened to load anything from McAfee... That would be another prime suspect for performance drain. I have never before seen a program that so consistently drags on computer performance as McAfee VirusScan or whatever they're calling it now. It basically saps about 1/3 of the total system performance just doing it's usual thing where virtually every other AV program is more like 10-15% if that. At an old job we had to disable that thing any time we did a backup to replace someone's computer, otherwise we'd be waiting for hours.

But some specifics like system specs (RAM in particular) and the programs you use on a regular basis might help pin down other possibilities.

Edit: And popeye does have a decent point that something like the indexing process may be at work, though I doubt it would cause that much of a drain on performance. Still, maybe give it until Monday to let it settle a bit and see if things pick up.

Some anti-virus programs can really slow a system down. In my case Kaspersky was taking up 100% of CPU or Disk usage at various times, without doing active scans. Going to Windows Defender instead really cleaned and sped things up on my machine.

You have not had it long enough. It will take sometime to do all the Windows updates and various other things. Literally 100s of things....Several days.

Similarly you will need sometime to get any sort of informed opinion on Windows 8.1....Months.
I bought a Windows 8.1 Laptop some 6 months ago.

There is nothing wrong with your Laptop, you are being impatient in the extreme.

There is nothing wrong with McAfee, it was initially on my Laptop, part of the usual manufacturers installs. It did not slow anything at all. Resource usage was quite minimal, I did look intensively because of it's reputation and it was for about 4 weeks. After the trial period it was uninstalled, I used something else, but you do learn from this not to believe some myths and out of date reputations.

I think it was all the updating. Things seem to be running faster today.
Also these HP laptops have so much stuff loading at start up, I disabled everything apart from avast.


I have to say, I love the apps and touch screen. I really do not understand why people are so blinkard about windows 8. I think it's revolutionary.

well..
I have had this thing for 2 weeks now. It was running so slowly, that we recovered windows on it, and re-installed our software programs.
Now, if I click on any program, there's a blue wheel for about 10+ seconds then the program opens.
Shutdown and restart take about 4 minutes, which is not normal.
My son has a pc with an i5, and windows 8.1 loads Instantly. I have a pc with an Intel Core i7 3770K @ 3.50GHz Windows 7 enterprise, and windows shuts down and loads in less than 25 seconds.
This laptop is slow as molasses. It has an Intel core i7 4710 HQ @ 2.5.
12.0 gb ddr3.
1 TB hard drive, Intel HD graphics 4600.
Why is this laptop sooooo slow?

popeye said:

Hello and welcome!

Since it is new it could be doing a lot of updates in the background and system cleanup which can really slow things down. Is there a lot of hard drive activity and what does Task Manager show? Especially CPU and network activity.

Click to expand...

Hi there

I'll bet the slowness is because the machine is doing a LOT of Disk I/o (either updating things or running I/O intensive applications.
Most laptop HDD's are abominably slow -- poor cache and 5400 RPM.

Upgrade the HDD to 7200 RPM or get an SSD. !!!!

With SLOW HDD's even a CRAY supercomputer would run slow. People usually forget how important good disks are to performance. That fact is easily confirmed by many people who run SSD's on really old hardware and are amazed at the performance improvment.

It's usually very simple to change the HDD in a laptop.

Cheers
jimbo

Thanks
Sorry to have to ask you, but is it feasible to add an SSD to a laptop? I mean is there space inside?
Or are you suggesting that I kill the 1 tb HD in the machine and replace it?
Sorry do not know much about laptops.

quovadis123 said:

Thanks
Sorry to have to ask you, but is it feasible to add an SSD to a laptop? I mean is there space inside?
Or are you suggesting that I kill the 1 tb HD in the machine and replace it?
Sorry do not know much about laptops.

Click to expand...

Look at the manual or look one up on internet, most high end laptops have place for another drive inside or CD/DVD drive can be replaced by a SSD/HDD.
Meanwhile, open and leave open performance monitoring or just Task Manager to see what is using more memory, CPU and disk than it should.