Backgground: There was a thunderstorm on night during sunday night and I had unblugged my laptop from wall socket when it started. However, on monday my laptop (Easynote TJ75) recently crashed after, I believe, trying to wake up from hibernation and became extremely sluggish and unstable (number of progams either failed to run or became unstable). During HD checking I found that numerous system files were damaged and there was damage go drive index as well. Unfortunately system restore points were also wiped so no system restore was possible so I had to resort restoring to factortory defaults. Problem is both during reinstall process and after it, system is still slow, sluggish and unresponsive. I'm running out of things to check:

Processor runs cool and is barely used (1-5% load)
There's plenty of memory ~30% used out of 4GB and memory diagnostic finds nothing wrong with them.
HD check is running but has found nothing wrong so far (no read/write problems with 60% of drive so far).
This is completely formated and reinstalled system so it SHOULD work like it used to when I bought it (took whopping 5+ hours to complete. That can't be normal, can it?).

I'm starting to lean toward hardware failure as I'm running out of tricks to try so does anyone have any more suggestions before I take it to store for analysis? Any guesses what part is failing if it's hardware problem (worrying about repair cost)?

Have you tried this?

http://www.w7forums.com/use-chkdsk-check-disk-t448.html

if that won't repair your HDD index, then probably it's doomed... (I'm not an expert of any kind, the link I gave you is usually the first thing you should try)

I fscked my drive once, and chkdsk repaired it, but it was on WinXP.

The system was completely formated durring restoring to factory settings so drive index should be ok and CHKDSK has already passed it (now read/write testing empty HD space for errors with 65% done with no errors). It was CHKDSK that found the errors first time after system crash and did repair parts of it but system remained sluggish and unstable and I had to resort to full system restore (all restore points were also wiped in crash) so this is clean reinstall.

You can try to run a linux live-cd like ubuntu and check the performance there. You can run also some system-cds to check memory and other hardware parts.

http://www.livecdlist.com/
http://www.sysresccd.org/SystemRescueCd_Homepage
http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/

Does your machine have a hidden partition with a diagnostic utility? If so, give that a whirl since it'll do at least rudimentary checks on pretty much all of the hardware.

It ended up being harddrive problem, numerous bad sectors actually that caused the freezes when ever computer tried to read/write on/from those sectors. It's been replaced and system restored to factory defaults but won't have time to test it out today unfortunately. I hope it works as I do need it with me now and again. I also hope the 400+GB of files I copied from the HD are intact.