Laptop EXTREMELY slow.

[Newtonuti]

Hi! Two weeks ago, I purchased myself a HP 15-da00038na Laptop. Intel i5 8550u, 8GB RAM, Intel UHD Graphics and a 1TB Hard Drive. The laptop is EXTREMELY slow at dping even the simplest tasks eg. booting up, loading web pages, opening word documents, even just opening ANYTHING in Windows Explorer. I've run spyware and anti virus checks, which were clean, and I'm a bit stuck as to where to go next, apart from returning it and getting a refund (I'm starting to despise this laptop).

[ieio]

did it become slow or was it slow from the beginning?

in the first case proceed with a factory reset, in the second one most probably there can be an issue with the hardware (most probably HD or RAM) so bring it back to the shop

[Newtonuti]

I'm fairly sure it has always been slow, is there any way of determining if it IS a hardware issue?

[ieio]

you can run stress tests for the hardware, some HP bios have such tools, so check it. otherwise there is plenty of software that can be run under Windows.

sometimes it can be also that HD/RAM/... are not plugged into their sockets completely/properly, so this is worthy to be checked (for instance a laptop came to me after an HD change from standard to SSD and the previous "tech guy" forgot to put back the screws, so the new SSD was giving weird reactions/random errors because the read/write process was somehow failing... problem fixed with 1screw)

[Newtonuti]

After ensuring all driver and windows updates were installed, including a bios update, it was exactly the same. It took nearly 8 hours to reset the laptop to factory settings, so I’ve requested a replacement for Amazon. If the replacement is the same, I’ll be asking for a refund!