Laptop suddenly became v. slow; after reformat, it's still v. slow!

We purchased the laptop about 2 months ago; it was all good and well, games would run smoothly, applications would load quickly, boot time was next to instant, and so on.
Despite this, the laptop has suddenly gone all slow and sluggish; it wasn't even progressive: we turned it off one night and the day after when we booted it back up, it took forever to load. Also, we had this black screen with just the mouse cursor, and the screen would stay like this for a good 5 - 10 minutes before the login screen would appear, and such would be the case, again, after we logged in. We didn't do anything to the laptop either prior to its slowing down.
We got a bit fed up so we decided to reformat, yet the laptop is still sluggish and slow?! We're seriously out of ideas: we've virus, malware and spyware scanned, we've also defragmented the hard drive and have ran chkdisk scans (which all took forever), all of which have come up with nothing. Any ideas, please? :/

Specs if they're of any use:

Windows 7 64-bit
Intel Pent T4400
ATI Mobility HD 4570
4 GB Memory

 

what make is it andwhy havnt you contacted your suppliers customer support as its such a new laptop.

 

ACER; the problem was a bit on and off, however it became persistent last night whereby every bootup was slow etc. Last night was a Sunday and today is a bank-holiday, thus customer support isn't open.

 

A fan is malfunctioning,a bad driver(maybe through windows update),a faulty processor(rare).Of course all these are rough guesses.Very strange for such a new machine.Definitely contact Acer....

 

have you also tried the Acer nbr thread HERE

edit: just a thought.
with the black screen on startup,have you left a cd or dvd in the drive or got a memory stick plugged in.
had a major problem at work 6 months ago as we had a licence key usb dongle plugged in and after a windows update it just blacked screened until i tried booting without the dongle plugged in.

 

Thanks for the replies guys; I managed to fix it!
I forgot I had split the HDD into two partitions, one for windows and programs and the other for documents. For some reason, the one partition was NTFS (windows) and the other (documents) was labelled as 'RAW' so I converted that to NTFS, and the laptop is now back to normal. I'm still confused but I guess I won't be doing that again

 

If it was RAW, then it was never formatted.

 

And as such should have had no bearing on the speed of the machine. This all sounds very strange.

Gary

 

Aye, keep an eye on this, excessively slow speeds can be a sign of a failing drive, and the whole other partition going raw might also point to that.

 

Whoop, the second part of my post didn't go up for some reason.

If it was RAW then it was never formatted. If you did partition and format, but it's now showing RAW format, the partition table either got corrupted or destroyed. There's something wrong with the drive if the partition table just up and wrecks itself autonomously.