Solid hdd light, disk 100% highest active time, very slow

This is on an HP HDX16 1370us laptop

About 8 months ago I kept getting BSOD's and several programs indicated that my hard drive had failed. I replaced the hard drive, but was unable to reinstall windows due to this hard drive light issue which I will describe below. I used linux for the past 8 months since it worked fine with no problems, but I am tired of it and want to go back to windows.

Right now I'm trying to get a fresh install working properly. The installation was a normal speed about until it went to load the desktop for the first time, although in the past it has started freezing during the installation process. Basically here are the symptoms:

- On boot, the hdd activity will be normal until it gets to the end of the windows logo with the black background, about then the hdd light comes on solid
-I've only been able to boot into windows normally once, and that was on initial installation.
- In safe mode it was still very slow, like right clicking on the taskbar and opening task manager, then waiting 5-10 minutes for it to load.
- If I boot into the recovery manager and run chkdsk from command prompt, it has no problems accessing the hard drive normally.
- When I turn it on, it takes about half an hour to get to the login screen. So far it's been 50 minutes since boot and I still don't have a desktop. I did have welcome screen for a few minutes, now I have a black screen with the cursor. The cursor is not frozen.

I don't think it's a hardware problem since linux worked perfectly for months, and the hard drive was new. I installed the chipset driver from HP but have not been able to update the bios yet since I'm still waiting for it to reboot. Any help would be appreciated, and I'll try to respond as quickly as possible if you need any additional information.

Thanks!

So of course I managed to fix the problem shortly after posting this. I had to boot into safe mode with command prompt and manually change the power settings to high performance. As soon as I did this it started working perfectly. Anyone know why?

Ok, the laptop works perfectly while plugged in, but if I try to run on battery the hdd light comes on solid and it won't start working properly until I've had it plugged in for about a minute. I've made sure the power settings are the same between the "plugged in" and "on battery" profiles (including the advanced power settings), but it seems like there must be some other group of settings that I'm not seeing. Any suggestions?

Here you go:

I don't think any of the startup items are the problem as the problem has existed before windows even finished installing (it was plugged in, but the "balanced" power plan was causing the issue). The only power options I see in the bios are "fan always on" and "enable processor c6 states" which I tried disabling to no avail.

Yes after changing the power plan to high performance everything works perfectly fine. Wireless, bluetooth, everything. I did go into the advanced settings and made sure everything matched between "plugged in" and "on battery" (for the high performance plan which it is always on), but there's still something causing it to lock up.