Brand new laptop.....why is it so slow?

[ashamednamechanger]

It is driving me bonkers. If it goes any slower it will come to a complete standstill. I can almost heare it churning when it comes on.
I only got it a week ago to replace my broken netbook that was like lightning compared to this thing.
It's not just when I connect to internet, either, it's slow at everything offline too.
Its a Toshiba satellite c660.
any advice would be great.

That's definitely not right and it is worth contacting either your place of purchase or Toshiba tech support about it. Sounds possible that you have faulty hardware - maybe a dud hard drive or something drastically overheating...

Once that possibility has been ruled out, then it'd be time to diagnose whether it's something software related that's misbehaving, but I really wouldn't waste time fiddling around now if it's still under warranty and so brand new.

One question though - was it like this the day you got it, or has it got drastically slower since last week?

it has been like this since day 1.
however i have just removed macafee and its suddenley become like lightning.

PMSL!!! The first thing I was going to suggest if hardware were ruled out was to remove McAfee or Norton (didn't know which was installed - but it's generally one or the other) and replace with Avast Free or Microsoft Security Essentials

It will have come preloaded with a load of crap free trial software - unfortunately they all do now. Guidance to remove it

why do they preload all this crap in the 1st place?

Because they get paid to do so by the various software companies that are touting offering trials of their programs.

You'd be surprised at how high a percentage of customers will just pay for a subscription for whatever security package has been installed on their PC when they buy it, without even considering the alternatives - many of which are free. McAfee, Norton, Trend Micro, et al., get a lot of custom that they otherwise wouldn't, so probably pay a decent amount to the PC manufacturer to bundle their software in with the machine that ships to the customer.