I Think I have a hidden, stubborn virus/malware/trojan

[Clair de Lune]

When I play a game online, it stutters every 10-15 seconds with a 1-2 second pause. This is highly annoying and nearly makes it unplayable.

I thought it was my ISP/router/modem and bugged the hell out of them. Everything was concluded to be fine after a looooong hassle of buying a new router, getting modem replaced, etc...

Then I started to suspect it's may be my actual PC. So I installed the same game on my laptop and played on it. No such stutter.

So I'm assuming it's a virus/malware/trojan of sort in my desktop that's causing these hiccups.

I have Avast's live protection on and scanning doesn't pick up anything except this 1 malware. I delete it and it seems to be gone. Then few days later, it's picked up again. So it looks like Avast is not effectively cutting the root of the problem. Same goes for Malwarebyte & Spybot. All are updated with latest version/definition of course.

1. It has to be the virus causing the stutter right?
2. How do I get rid of this virus? Maybe I'll do the pre-boot system scan.
3. I'm tempted to just backup and format my PC... ugh.

Any ideas?

 

[mechBgon]

The virus/trojan might not be the cause of the stutter. What was the exact name of the malware you've removed and had come back, by the way?

 

[rasczak]

your stuttering maybe casued by a bad sector on your hard drive. do a chkdsk to verify and if nothing comes up, reinstall the game, preferably on another hard drive or at the very least a different partition.

 

[imported_oreca]

I agree. It could be a bad sector that's causing the stutter. Or there could be an issue with your page file. When windows virtual is too low, processes don't act smoothly at all.


-------------------------
voice recognition software
how to remove w32.ircbot

 

[BW86]

If its bothering you to the point of replacing routers/modems why not just do a clean install?

 

[Maldian]

Take the hard drive out and put it as a secondary drive on another machine. Use malwarebytes and also your antivirus to scan and clear all malware and viruses from that particular drive. Then place it back in the original machine and then boot up. Check it for operability.