Brand new with performance issues -- programs not responding, system hanging

Question

Just this morning I began migrating from a Dell Inspiron 1525 laptop that has been generally reliable for the better part of 3 years (monitor housing is literally falling apart but still works great... check E-Bay later for spare parts! lol)... migrating to a Toshiba Satellite C655D-S5136 laptop running Windows 7 64-bit.  It's literally right out of the box 5 hours ago and I've been reinstalling programs, transferring files, etc.
The problem is that I'm already noticing a lot of performance issues.  The system (and/or programs) seem to get caught often... resulting in frequent "Program not responding" messages (some of which the system manages to bypass)... and a few of the "This program closed unexpectedly" or "This program stopping responding... do you want to check online for a solution or just close the program?" messages.
This is happening on multiple programs... tax prep software TaxAct update dialog hangs after 256 bytes downloaded every time, AVG Anti-Virus was hanging although never gave me a not responding message, Internet Explorer has stopped responding a couple times, Windows Live Mail did often, especially when I was using IMAP (since changed to POP3 and problem seems to have resolved but still).  Even opening the start menu a few seconds after plugging in an external hard drive lagged the system like hell for a full two minutes until it caught up with itself.
This is unacceptable in a brand new machine.  I was getting a few errors like this on my Dell every now and then but I chalked it up to an old machine that had never been wiped and had a failing hard disk.  I understand the computer moving slower, especially as I've been installing a lot, running antivirus, downloading all at once, but no way programs should simply stop responding this often.  I could do twice the activity on my Dell and have no issues.
I've uninstalled several of the preloaded programs... the antivirus, quickbooks, etc.  I've also disabled and/or uninstalled several of the other programs like Toshiba Reeltime and Toshiba Zoom Manager or whatever that was.  Nothing has seemed to help.  And that's not surprising... the speed is great, it's that programs are getting caught so often, sometimes every time or every other time I open up a program.
Is this a Windows 7 thing? (This is first time using Windows 7, coming from Vista).  Is it a Satellite thing?
Anyone have any suggestions?  Is it possible there's just some component that's bad?  Processor, RAM, etc.?
Thanks... very frustrated!

Answer 1

I may have found a solution. I changed my startup programs and stopped some of the Toshiba software from running at startup. The ones I stopped are listed below. I have used the laptop heavily for two days now and have not had any problems. It actually runs very fast. I hope this will help.
Toshiba Reel Time
Toshiba Sleep
Toshiba PC Health Monitor
Toshiba WebCamera App.
Toshiba Power Saver
Toshiba Message Center
Toshiba Service Station
SmartFaceVWatcher
Toshiba Online Backup
Toshiba Zooming Utility
Toshiba eco Utility
Toshiba App Place 
Message Center
For people that don't know how to change these, here are the instructions.
Click Start > Type msconfig in the search box > open msconfig > click on the startup tab > remove the checkmarks next to the above programs > restart computer.
Doing this may not fix your problems, but it did fix mine.