Painfully slow Hp laptop from new???

[Jimmy8484]

Purchased the above last year. We use it on average once a month for emails or a word document on Microsoft office. Since day one it's been PAINFULLY slow. Takes roughly 20mins to get to desktop stage then slow to open anything! Over half the time the screen saver comes up but won't bring up the password login screen. 

I'm not massively computer minded. Yes I wish we'd taken it back. There's no games, videos, music etc on it. It's not fit for purpose but I'm stuck with it now. Is there anything I can do without reprogramming the bloody thing? I see lost of people moaning, what have HP done to rectify this issue as obviously not a one off??

[WAWood]

@Jimmy8484 

Presuming the laptop is running Win10, one serious problem with the new PCs is that Windows Update (WU)  runs automatically on them every week, and when it does that, it brings the PC basically to a grinding halt, sometimes for hours at a time.

Since this usually happens on "patch Tuesday", then or shortly thereafter (whenever you reboot your PC), you're going to experience a painfully slow PC, loud fan noise, 100% disk utilization -- and possible for hours.  But after that, performance should return to normal.

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.