So a couple of days ago I installed a torrent and was bombarded with adware, stuff like PC speed up, shopperz, Advanced PC Care, MyBrowser, Swift search, all kinds of junk.

I ended up getting rid of it all, or 'quarantined' it all with AdwCleaner. Everything seemed to be back to normal, but I noticed I have this 'Not Responding' stutter on all of my programs now. It flickers on and off constantly, and my programs in my taskbar like Firefox look like they're being killed and re-opened every now and again. My game's are also starting to stutter on Steam because of this.

I came across a solution but it only seems to work for Windows 7. Something to do with disabling the Desktop Manager? Supposedly they don't allow you to do this on windows 8.

Can anyone offer assistance? I'm pretty computer illiterate but I'm sure that much was obvious already

Specs are in the op, I received this computer as a gift