A tale of a terribly slow computer: Intel Management Engine Interface to blame

[birdie]

A friend of mine once called me because his computer had become dog slow and I really mean it - you could hardly even move a mouse pointer; any application start up (including something absolutely light like notepad or cmd) took literally dozens of seconds.

I was totally perplexed as his system looked just fine and worked beautifully in Safe Mode.

I don't know how but for some reasons I found a thread on the Internet where people suggested using Latency Monitor to check if drivers behaved correctly. After I launched it I immediately discovered a problem: HECIx64.sys (Intel Management Engine Interface) driver generated an insane amount of Interrupt Service Routines. Its total execution time amounted hundreds of milliseconds - quite strange for a part of the computer I've no idea how to use.

When I disabled this driver in Device Manager the computer instantly recovered from the illness.

I will post some screenshot to demonstrate the issue.

Computer hardware:

Motherboard: Gigabyte Z87-HD3
RAM: 4GB DDR3 1600MHz
CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-4570

Probably Intel has long fixed this problem by updating this driver but the owner of the PC told me to leave the offending piece of hardware disabled.

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