Samsung laptop slowed down

Question

I have a notebook NP550P5C from Samsung. It has impressive parameters:

1. 8 GB RAM
2. Intel i7 3610QM @ 2,3 GHz
3. 904 GB HDD with 8 GB SSD

It runs Windows 8.1 64bit. It used to be very fast but after 22 months it gets slow in normal operations. When I log in from sleep mode, it may take few minutes until everything is loaded. Firefox or Chrome - I can go for coffee when I switch tabs. It does not happen always but too often to notice.

I realized from a task manager that when the response is slow the HDD is 100% utilized. There is single partition and it has 146 GB of free space. Disk is not fragmentized. I noticed that there has never been any activity on SSD drive. It seems that it is not used at all. A merchant was claiming that SSD drive will host system files to boost the performance.

I try to minimize running background services. There is start8, crashplan, google drive and evernote.

1. Any idea how I can improve the performance? I think that windows reinstallation may help but that would be too costly from time perspective.
2. How can I make system use SSD drive?

Update:

Current findings:

• no hw health monitor program found any issue
• there is no problem with intel drivers
• CC Cleaner helped
• Switching off virtual memory helped. When I turn it on again, 100% HDD utilization is back

Answer 1

I just want to share that I reinstalled the computer completely to Windows 8.1 and it works fine again. So the solution was windows reinstallation. I spent much more time with attempts to fix the issue than I did with data backup and reinstallation. If you encounter this issue as well try to wipe your windows and install them from scratch.