Aspire e 15 touch "not responding" issues

A lot of my programs including File Explorer, Microsoft Office, internet pages in Chrome, Adobe photoshop and others keep freezing giving me a "Not Responding" message next to the program name at top in most programs. It takes up to a minute for them to start working again. This happens constantly and is driving me nuts. I ran a fix program for Microsoft Office from their site without success. A McAfee scan doesn't reveal any issues. Does anyone know how to fix this? I use my computer for writing manuscripts and it is frustrating that this happens every few minutes.