Brand new dell laptop is already crawling

fan barely running is the clue. new dells often ship in a quiet or balanced thermal mode, which throttles the cpu hard to keep the noise down. look in the MyDell app (or Dell Power Manager on some models) for the thermal setting and switch it to Optimized or Ultra Performance, and in Windows set Settings > System > Power > Power mode to Best performance. then open task manager and sort by CPU and disk. the first couple of weeks Windows is still indexing and pulling updates, and the bundled antivirus trial running alongside Defender doesn't help. uninstall the trial and anything else you didn't ask for.