After feeling incredibly depressed and defeated, I decided to give this another go. Checked to see if there was a new BIOS update (there was; flashed), turned off prefetch and superfetch, restarted.
At first, only dxkrnl.sys seemed to be a problem, but then we had storport 2 revenge of the storport.
How bad we talking..? This bad:
Honestly - I don't know where to go from here.
I keep finding long-dead internet forums about people disabling obscure service x here, enabling obscure registry edit here.
Plenty of people talk about 'oh, bruv, it's your w-lan! Just use PRECISELY THIS Windows XP wireless driver and it'll stop the problem, which apparently is known by both Wifi-Services and Microsoft.'
And then they don't even have the decency to provide a link to precisely which of five hundred revisions of driver it's worth installing.
What do I do next? Uninstall drivers one by one? I just don't know.
Here's what I did as of this update;
- Disabled Superfetch & Prefetch via regedit;
- Installed new BIOS update.
- Turned NVIDIA to 'max performance' in the NVIDIA control panel, and told it to prefer the GPU over CPU explicitly.
Edit - oh, woah, I can edit again? Weird.
Editing to add that the issue does seem to be pretty common, and a lot of people who have similar issues don't seem to benefit from rolling back/repair installing. I do think it's driver related, and not hardware related. I feel like I'm so close, I'm just too dumb to understand what it is I'm missing. And I know that all the people in my area have far less tech skill then I do, and my internet is slow, so - downloading creation media on my internet, which is worse then what I had in the 90s, will take a few days if I even wanted to go that route.
