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Malware or drive failure? Machine is crippled
Hello,
My gaming rig has recently been brought to it's knees. Windows 10 is able to boot up (a bit slowly), but afterwards, I am not able to do anything. I've seen everything stop by hovering over the icons in my taskbar (the hovering animations froze), the animation over the start menu remain while nothing happening...etc.
I am able to move the mouse and the keyboard responds. Loading what icons I have on my desktop takes a few minutes.
I am not sure if this is a result of malware of a driver failure - but I am pretty sure it is the hard drive, as I put it in a second machine and saw the same slow results.
I have tried accessing the troubleshooting methods that will pop up on the boot screen. I let it attempt to restore an older point for about 24 hours, and I let it attempt to reinstall windows while keeping my files for about 17 hours.
Through this same menu I accessed safe mode and it everything stopped responding very shortly there as well.
I recall doing 2 things before this started happening - I updated Nvidia drivers which did give me an error at first (don't remember what), and I also noticed that Malware Bytes wasn't turning on with Windows and I tried out the "self-protection" thing. I'm wondering if perhaps all my resources are being used up with the 2 fighting it out (the possible malware and malware bytes)... but I'm not sure if that would be expected to slow down everything else I described, like reinstalling Windows.
Any tips?