S400u unbearably slow - Please help!

Question

Hi all,
I've purchased this ultrabook in Brazil, in September/13.
For the last few months it's been getting annoyingly slow, to the point that I'm getting really frustrated.
The main sympthoms are:
1) The computer gets really (really!) slow, particularly after returning from hibernation or sleep mode
2) Sometimes it freezes at the welcome screen; I use image based access security, where you have to click the same spot 3 times in order to login. After I do the 3 clicks it takes about 20 seconds to start processing the info.
3) The touchpad pointer freezes. The buttons usually still work, however the pointer itself stays frozen for up to a minute.
4) Programs get really slow and unresponsive. Initially I thought it was a problem with them, but after a while all of them started to show these problems!
5) The start menu gets really slow - If I want to look for a program or file by typing it's name at the start menu, it takes a long time for the characters to even show up at the search box and, when they do, it takes even longer for the program or file to show up below it. 
I've tried a number of actions in order to solve this issue, but the problem seems to grow at a fast pace.
Here's what I've done so far:
1) Updated drivers (with the drivers available at this website!)
2) Installed all Windows updates available (I run Windows 8.1)
3) Made registry modifications - to increase speed at certain tasks
4) After action 1 didn't work, I downloaded a software called Driver Boost (from iobit), to update the drivers again.
5) Installed a ram booster software
6) Used CCleaner to clean up the registry files
7) Changed the priority and affinity settings of certain tasks (lowered the priority for non-important tasks and increased for the important ones) in order to be able to dedicate more of the i5 processor's energy to what I use most.
8) Made sure the computer is free of virus and spyware.
9) Changed the power settings to max performance.
Every time I make one of these changes the computer gets a little faster for a little while, but then it gets worse.
Please assist, I use this computer to work and this is really frustrating, specially since it's suposed to be an ULTRAbook.

Answer 1

hi megllama
upgrading to ilife'06 might not be a bad idea but my question to you is what was the size of your hard drive before? you say that you have 11 gigs left. according to apple you require 20% of harddrive to be free to allow the system to work quickly and smoothly. do you clean all your caches and cookies? freeing up space is probably what you need. download 'onyx' a maintenance application. use it to clear out caches, cookies etc. lastly, provided that you can spare the expense a memory upgrade wouldn't hurt. more RAM is a big help.