Acer Predator Helios Laptop
Model: PH315-51-71FS
Part #: NH.Q3FAA.007
CPU: Intel Core i7-8750H 2.20GHZ
Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060, 6GBytes GDDR5 RAM
System RAM: 16 GBytes, 2x8 DDR4, 1 unit Kingston, 1 unit G.Skill
Purchased December 2018
Windows 10 x64, no skipped updates, OEM version that came on the machine, reinstalled a few days ago using the internal copy. Reinstall seemed to help for a while.
Malwarebytes seems to be the trigger (not thinking it is the actual cause). System Interrupts go insane using up all CPU, and if I poke the system too hard, it BSODs.
Malwarebytes has managed several scans (it is scanning weirdly often given current settings) and claims I am virus-free.
I suspect a driver or BIOS issue, but messing with Malwarebytes or drivers once the problem starts is a reliable way to BSOD, even using the system repair tools, and before the problem starts, I am not sure what needs to be fixed.
Also, thanks to a borked BIOS update almost immediately after getting the laptop, I would need to send it to Texas and pay $100 to ransom an unlocked BIOS. So, I hope it isn't that.
Symptoms:
A week or two ago (long, stupid, irrelevant story why I don't know for sure), what had been a perfectly running system very abruptly started throwing BSODs at me in the middle of playing FFXIV (an MMO). When I restarted, molasses in January.
I tried everything I could think of short of reinstalling Windows, to no avail. Even the dirty reinstall failed. Only the "clean" reinstall seemed to have fixed it, but the moment I finished reinstalling MWB, back to running like molasses. I found this site looking for slowdowns related to MWB. Per one of the threads related to that, I tried checking to see what was calling for attention during the slowdowns using the command prompt, but while the system was running slow, it wasn't responding at all.
Turning off Ransomware protection seems to abate the symptoms, but especially on a laptop, I am not thrilled with that being off.
Zip from the data collection app attached.
A note about the collection app- it seems to have issues with systems where the Documents and Desktop folders have been moved from their default locations using the folder Properties. Not sure if that is fixable or not, but i had to change the locations back to the defaults for it to work at all beyond throwing an error saying it couldn't find anything. If I hadn't found the thread mentioning that turning off ransomware protection temporarily improved the situation, that would have been somewhere between torturous and impossible, depending on whether it caused a BSOD. Not complaining, as I was able to work it out, just mentioning for future reference.
