So, over the last month or so, I have been having what I thought was HDD troubles. It felt like the HDD in my laptop was dying. Constantly running at 100% Disk and jut generally being slow and unstable as you can imagine.
After some searching around my services and such I came face-to-face with the dreaded
"CompatTelRunner.exe" - After a little bit of messing around I managed to get rid of it and my Disk % dropped to 0%...YAY...I thought my troubles were over...but they were just beginning!
So...after disabling that, I rebooted and b00m...back to 100%.."wtf is going on now" I thought...so back to services.msc I went, and when looking around in Task Manager as well I decided to disable Windows Search and Superfetch...once they were disabled...back to 0% I went...so a quick reboot just to check it was all OK, and good god...wtf just happened? Now my laptop wouldn't boot! I just got stuck with the "Acer" logo and the spinny ball of doom...so I left it for a coupe of hours and it finally got back to my login screen...which when I entered my password threw up some odd error saying it couldn't find the login service...so...reboot again...2 hours later...back to login screen...managed to get back to the desktop (which then took an hour before it was usable) - At this point I did an emergency backup of some persona files (I managed to get 100kb/s transfer rate!!!...so doing a transfer of 40GB of stuff took...a while haha). Once that was done, I disabled Windows Defender and installed MalwareBytes (Defender was always something that ran disk at 100% when it wanted to do something I didn't want it to do)...so..MalwareBytes downloaded and installed (after a bit of a fight and a long wait)...I did a scan...nothing...not a single thing...no virus, no trojan...no nothing...so.......what now?!)..
I then disabled everything on startup that Windows itself didn't need to run...and then rebooted...
This was the final time it wanted to let me reboot.
After being presented with "Loading Startup Repair" for >8 hours, my laptop finally loaded up the screen to do repairs. I decided to just go for the final step of re-installing Windows (but keeping my personal files...I like that we can do that now...very nice feature indeed!)..so...this took an unreal amount of time - I just put the laptop on charge, put the laptop out of sight and came back to it the next day. When I came back to it, I was presented with the usual success screens and was prompted to login...which I did. AWESOME! It's running perfectly! - I went to Windows.old to grab some of my old software and put it back into Program Files (x86) (Specifically one of the games I wanted to play). This went smoothly, and the game itself loaded perfectly fine and ran smooth as possible...so at this point I am thinking that all my troubles were over and that maybe it was just a problem with my Windows install...
Oh how I was wrong!!
Rebooted due to an update, and OMFG...right back to square 1....100% Disk Usage.........
Not being able to afford a new HDD on the wrong side of Christmas, my only option was to fight with the damn thing.....
I got back to the desktop after many hours of fighting with it, re-disabled all the annoying services (Superfetch and Search and such), and again disabled CompatTelRunner.exe, and then in task manager I ended an instance of svchost.exe which was eating up most of my system processes...and then...my disk dropped to 1%....so...not being trusting, I just carried on using my laptop like normal, opening tbs in chrome, browsing the web, launching/playing my game...it stayed at low usage (minus when it was obvious why it was running high like when loading a game and such...y'know...the times you kind of expect your HDD to be running at a high-ish usage)...when leaving the game the HDD dropped right back to 0% and well...has been fine for the last week.....
The issue is...I am pretty positive that when I reboot...all my troubles will start again...yet for the past 7 days it has been perfectly fine...no unusual spikes...no hiccups...no anything....but also no reboots...I refuse to reboot...I just put the laptop to sleep and make sure it never runs out of battery!
However....
With the fact that for 7 days it has been fine even under high loads I can't be sure that it really was a HDD problem...but this begs the question.....wtf is it?
Anybody experienced the same hell I'm going through? Or maybe able to identify a potential issue that's causing this?
Any help would be wonderful! xD
~Stephen
