U410 horrible performance out the box

Question

Got a new U410 with Windows 8, 1TB hard drive, 24GB SSD, 8 GB RAM.
The performance has been terrible out of the box, freezes constantly on start up and after sleeping as well. Can take around 10-15 minutes or longer before it warms up a bit and provides acceptable performance but it can still lock up at a later time.
I did a factory reset, optimize and defrag of hard disk. There does not seem to be any app as a resource hog. Someone suggested I may have a faulty HD although like I said, the defrag did not come up with any bad sectors.
I also thought booting would be a lot faster with the 24GB SSD but it's no faster than my other laptop with no SSD.
Any suggestions as t what I should try or have we been shipped a lemon? Should I be requesting a replacement? Surely I should work fairly speedily out of he box?
Thank you.

Answer 1

Unfortunately, the only way to get the best performance out of any new laptop is to perform drive reformat and clean install Windows like I did on my y470. Also, I prefer to install drivers from the manufacturer's website rather than Lenovo's as much as possible. If I remember correctly the only drivers I installed from Lenovo are "Management Engine Interface" and Lenovo Energy Management. Everything else came from Nvidia, Intel, JMicron, Renesas, Realtek, etc.
In the process, I lost some of the Lenovo apps that I didn't need like Veriface, One Key Theater etc. If you value these programs, you have to deal with the lower performance of the factory reset. However, if you don't need the extras that Lenovo provides with their factory reset, you can expect around 18 second boot time and 6 second shutdown time on a spinning hard drive with fresh Windows install. Above all, you will rarely, if ever, encounter freezing. Nothing beats the stability and reliability of a good clean install.
This is for Windows 7. For Windows 8, you should get less than 10 second boot time, and less than 6 second shutdown time.
Since you are using WIndows 8 with U410, I suggest you follow this Lenovo thread so that you get your SSD properly working, and you should get SSD like performance due to SSD caching. SSD Caching doesn't take effect until you have used your commonly accessed programs frequently.
Lenovo Y470: i7-2670QM | 8 GB DDR3 1333 MHz RAM | Nvidia GeForce GT 550M | 500 GB 7200 RPM Seagate HDD | ASUS PCE-AC56 802.11ac Network Adapter | Windows 7 Professional 64-bit