Every minute or so I get the blue rotating circle next to my cursor, like right now I stopped typing in this message and after 10 seconds I got the circle. This goes on all day. It spins for at least 5 seconds then stops. Then 5 to 8 seconds later starts spinning again even though I just watched the screen and typed nothing. Any ideas?
It sounds to me you have something running in the background causing this. This could be just about anything but most likely it's some of H.P. bloatware and/or Norton. The best way I know of to cure this problem is Clean install.
Clean Reinstall - Factory OEM Windows 7
Then install MSE.
Microsoft Security Essentials - Microsoft Windows
The reason for my suggestion is because H.P. has installed all kinds of crap that are not needed and Norton is known to not play with Windows 7 many many times. Doing any piece meal repair would still leave you with a H.P. bloated computer and a anti virus program that is a problem maker.
I uninstalled all the HP stuff I could find. If I go back to factory settings that won't help as I'll just have to iinstall all of it again to say nothing of installing all my software. I am running Norton and have for years with no problem. But frankly I've seen that rotating circle since day 1. It doesn't seem to stop me from doing anything, but it is annoying.
I think what I need to do is look at all the running apps and processes and see if I can discover some crap that's running. My system was preloaded from HP and didn't come with a disk. Just a factory partition (and it was fun trying to clone it to an SSD and getting it to boot from there).
Take a good read through these. It might give some ideas to help.
Clean Up Factory Bloatware
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/s.../bb896653.aspx
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