Ungodly slow and laggy laptop

[EAX8]

Today i just recieved a new HP Envy laptop that i bought a couple of days ago. Quickly after installation finished i noticed that it is extremly slow. It has a Ryzen 5 2500U, 8 gigs of ram, SSD and Vega 8 GPU so by no means a powerhouse. It is borderline unusable since rudimentary tasks like browsing the web is aganizingly slow. An example is writing something in the browser (chrome) can be lagging! How is that even possible... Everything is lagging, even though it does not use the CPU, GPU or SSD to the full capacity. I have removed some of the bloatware and run Ccleaner etc. on it. Internet based activities is the worst (even though i have 200/200 with fiberoptic internet. which will happily download in excess of 50mb pr. second on this laptop). Is the computer poorly made, is it a faulty unit or can something be done on the software side?

[WAWood · Accepted solution]

@EAX8 

Removing the "bloat" as you call it was essentially wasting your time -- as there is so little of that such that it's not really worth the effort with modern laptops and large capacity drives.

With a Win10 PC, you're going to experience a variety of problems not typical of the older PCs.

First is sluggishness. You may experience a very slow PC at times because Windows Update (WU) is hogging your PC, searching for, downloading, and installing updates -- to bring your PC up to the most current version of Windows. This can also contribute significantly to high processor temperatures, as it is being heavily used.

Second is fan noise. That's directly related to fan speed, which is the result of processor heat, and WU is known to drive up the processor load -- sometimes to 100%. That can cause the fan to run loud and continuous for some time.

Third is disk usage. WU can easily force the disk usage to 100% and and keep it pinned there for some time. That's because it writes WU files to the drive, then it turns around and reads them, then it overwrites existing Windows System files. All of that takes a lot of disk usage to complete.

These processes are compounded by Win10 because new Win 10 patches coming out nearly every Tuesday. Since you can't stop Updates like you did with Win7, this means you're going to get updates, regardless of what you do.

To find out what version and build of Win10 your PC is running, do the following:
1) enter "cmd" (without the quotes) into the search area and select the Command Prompt option
2) enter "winver" into the command window (again, without the quotes)
3) The most current Win10 versions as of 3/17/20 are the following:
a) v1803: Bld 17134.1399
b) v1809: Bld 17763.1131
c) v1903: Bld 18632.752
d) v1909: Bld 18363.752.

If yours is older than that, most likely WU is hogging your PC trying to update it.

Some folks have been told that resetting your PC will fix this. but, if you reset your PC, you only make matters WORSE! Why? Because you will reset Win10 back to the original version that came preloaded on the PC and that will restart Windows Update all over again.

To disable WU temporarily, do the following:
1) Enter "services" in the search area (again, without the quotes)
2) When the window opens, scroll down until you see Windows Update
3) If it say Running under status, that indicates that WU is running
4) To change that, double-click on that task, select Stop under the Service status, and then Apply
5) That should stop WU -- and you should see an immediate improvement in performance.

If not, then WU is not the problem.

WU will restart itself automatically later on, so you basically have no choice than to bear with it until it finishes.

[MehWhateverYeah]

Usually when a new computer is "incredibly slow" it means the CPU is thermally limiting due to someone forgetting to place the thermal pad on the processor to allow proper cooling to the case. You can benchmark it by using CPU-Z to see if it is benchmarking way low for the processor type. Mine was benchmarking less than 5% of what it should have. If that's the case, then send it back before your 30 day return period expires. My story: https://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Notebook-Hardware-and-Upgrade-Questions/New-HP-17-by2000-Laptop-PC-stu...