I have read through a fair few pages of this thread but not all so apologies in advance but:
I have noticed that userbenchmark shows poor performance on all my storage since last update. Previously...

How To Map a WD Network Drive on Windows 10 | WD Support

I live a couple of miles from CCL. If using the same case, storage and power supply £300 will do the first stage of an upgrade.

I went from i7 sandy bridge to:

x370 mobo £50
DDR4 16Gb...

Thats old(ish) tech and does not give you much headroom for upgrades. I think you can build a PC for that maybe using a Ryzen G CPU and upgrading the graphics later. I'd suggest GTX1070 as a minimum.

Yeah I had it set to 3000ms. I didn't need to do any of it, I just wondered why idle temp was fluctuating between 35-40c. Anyway I've simplified the post quite a bit. Actually it was atikmdag.sys...

100 for SATA SSD? Price of NVMEs have dropped considerably, for £119 I can get a 500Gb Samsung 970 evo from Amazon UK, will be even cheaper elsewhere. Makes Windows so much more usable.

Just thought I'd share my experience of the last few days. I built myself a new PC which I am very happy with, Ryzen 7 2700X, 16Gb etc... Anyway its very good and as you will understand I have been...

SCP secure copy?

LOL. a fortuitous TYPO indeed.

Oh, I guess I'll have to buy a license then. That returned as blocked. Mind you I've done OK as the license I had was from taking pics of the stickers in PC world!

Getting back to the original topic....Is this still omgoing? I have the watermark showing up every now and again, it was there 2 hrs ago but not now.

Well the polite request to activate has gone for now so all is good. Still way impressed to go from sandy bridge i7 to Ryzen 7 and Win took maybe 10 seconds longer to boot the first time. Oh my days!

Well that went smoothly.....I now have activate win messages too!
Mind you I did change mobo, ram and cpu 10 mins after install....hats off to them I say, I just swapped the NVME over and win 10 did...

I'd try recreating your file structure in a totally different disk location. The problem is not global therefore if it follows you...well you're the problem! OK something you do or a program you're...

Is this global or just some folders in a specific location?

I drag 250Gb of music into the playlist and they bork. LOL. I realise that was probably a big ask but in these days of massive storage for cheap a media player should handle it. And don't get me...

I can't remember a version of windows that does not occasionally screw up the time....maybe win2k or wfw3.11. So when I went to the pub yesterday I was an hour early!

I'm generalising but if you have the NVME slot in use and a PCIEx16 graphics card then that might be all your PCIE lanes used up. The slots in your red rectangle are PCIEx1 so not suitable for a PCIE...

Check the event viewer for the times it does this, will likely give you a better idea.

I think I might have found the problem...or a problem anyway. I decided to run some benchmarks on the NVME which whilst way faster than my other drives was not quite what I was expecting. Given that...

I am shying away from trying anything in BIOS as I did that the other day and had a brick for 24hrs! Thanks for your suggestions though.

I decided that I would quite like an NVME SSD even though my PC is quite old. i7 Sandy Bridge, 24Gb RAM.
So I have installed a PCIE NVME card with an XPG sx8200 ssd. I think that it is not possible...