Alienware M17X R4

This is long overdue but has always bugged me. Bought an Alienware last year, was so excited.

M17X R4

8GB RAM

i7 processor

not using SSD drive

Nvidia GTX 660M

Immediately unboxed and turned it on. Was experiencing an unresponsive system..Bought it primarily for gaming with the mindset, " if it can handle games, it can handle anything!" Games run at an acceptable smoothness but other than that it's very slow. Start up is slow, open a file is slow, shutdown is slow and when i restart, certain startup apps do not start, and this happens at random. basically multitasking on the machine is frustrating.

Is there anything I can do? I've reformatted, I'm not  unaware to the basic solutions like managing startups, clearing old data, but like I said, after formatting, the unresponsiveness is still there. Is this a Window 8 thing? Please Help!