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I have an HP Laptop (Core i5, 8GB RAM, 320GB HDD) running Windows 8.1 (x64), that recently got the Sality.AU Virus. The OS had only just been installed, and a friend downloaded the drivers and put them on a USB for me. As it would turn out, the USB had the Sality.AU Virus, and my PC went crazy with Windows Defender warnings as soon as I plugged it in.

After cleaning the virus with Windows Defender, my HDD constantly spins at 100%, even though I have almost no programs (only Torch Browser, Rainmeter and the default OS programs) open.

I have tried the solutions at these two pages on this site

to no avail.

I have also searched the Internet with my problem, and had some pages tell me that my HDD is faulty, some tell me that my Windows is faulty, and others tell me that I installed bad programs, which I can't have, since I have installed all the same programs on my other Toshiba laptop.

My Task Manager gives me the following information:

Task Manager - Performance Task Manager - Processes

and Speccy also says that my HDD is "Good"

enter image description here
[The above image, and this text, link to a complete copy of the same image.]

I have no idea what is going on here, as my HDD was fine when I was on my previous (but VERY SLOW due to many installed programs) installation of Windows 8.1 (also x64), and never went over maybe 80% usage when running a copy, and 20% when loading a program or game.

I cannot reinstall the OS, as I do not have the install disks for some of the programs that I use regularly anymore.

Please advise on what to do with my PC. I can only think of one option, which is to buy a new HDD, and ghost the old HDD's partitions onto the new HDD.

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Riccorbypro
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  • Upon further research, and delving into the Event Viewer, I found the following "Warning": wuaueng.dll (960) SUS20ClientDataStore: A request to read from the file "C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution\DataStore\DataStore.edb" at offset 56000512 (0x0000000003568000) for 32768 (0x00008000) bytes succeeded, but took an abnormally long time (43 seconds) to be serviced by the OS. In addition, 0 other I/O requests to this file have also taken an abnormally long time to be serviced since the last message regarding this problem was posted 7 seconds ago. This problem is likely due to faulty hardware. – Riccorbypro Oct 17 '14 at 18:04
  • Another one: LiveComm (2924) C:\Users\Richard\AppData\Local\Packages\microsoft.windowscommunicationsapps_8wekyb3d8bbwe\LocalState\LiveComm\58e72693e6453dba\120712-0049\: A request to read from the file "C:\Users\Richard\AppData\Local\Packages\microsoft.windowscommunicationsapps_8wekyb3d8bbwe\LocalState\LiveComm\58e72693e6453dba\120712-0049\DBStore\livecomm.edb" at offset 7716864 (0x000000000075c000) for 8192 (0x00002000) bytes succeeded, but took an abnormally long time (21 seconds) to be serviced by the OS. This problem is likely due to faulty hardware. – Riccorbypro Oct 17 '14 at 18:05
  • follow this http://pastebin.com/AyxAVU60 and give me the file or analyze it yourself: http://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Defrag-Tools/Defrag-Tools-44-WPT-DiskIO-Analysis – magicandre1981 Oct 17 '14 at 18:07
  • ok, done. link – Riccorbypro Oct 17 '14 at 18:40
  • I also noticed that the icon for the .7z file looks very similar to the Sality.AU icon. See image – Riccorbypro Oct 17 '14 at 18:45
  • Does the problem go away if you disable Windows Defender? – Jesan Fafon Oct 18 '14 at 00:34
  • I have tried ending the service, but it just starts up again. – Riccorbypro Oct 18 '14 at 06:49
  • ok, I posted an answer from the data I can see in the trace. – magicandre1981 Oct 18 '14 at 07:19

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By looking at the trace I can see that you disabled Write Caching for the HDD.

enter image description here

This slows down the HDD extremely. Go to the device manager and enable Write Caching again:

enter image description here

This should improve the performance.

magicandre1981
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