As you can see on the screenshot. Task Manager is saying that the Active Time of my NVM.e system drive has a lot of peaks that start to happen after a few minutes of using the PC and they won’t go away unless I restart. I have tried so many things that I gave up and formatted the whole drive and reinstalled Windows from scratch. I have also tried the chkdsk command and this problem won’t go away. This started to happen just a few days ago, out of the blue. The whole system freezes at every peak you see on the screenshot and the main tab of Task Manager reports the Disk Usage as being ~1%, so there is no process using the disk. Resource Monitor is also reporting the same thing.
Edit: I have narrowed down the problem to a insanely high Response Time on Resource Monitor (up to 2000ms). It is usually the “System” process that is having this high Response Time. Any way of fixing or at least knowing the root cause of this?
I know it seems impossible but the first thing I thought of was a chia coin mining malware.
I do not know what kind of software it is but would it survive a complete formatting of the drive?
It shouldn’t. The only two occasions where that might happen is if you used an infected Windows installer after the wipe or if it’s a rootkit, though the latter is much less likely.
Downloaded the installer directly via Microsoft website.