I never had issues with my laptop performance till some windows 8.1 updates earlier this week. At first, I thought it might be some malware, so I run all kind of tools and scans (it took me a really long time), but no issues were found and the laptop was showing an extremely bad performance: folders, programs and websites taking several minutes to load, as if I/O operations had slowed down by 20x, Chrome saying "waiting cache..." Then I went for a system restore, which fixed other kind of issues in the past, but for some reason I had a single restoration point and the rollback didnt solve the issue.
Then I came across this question: windows 7 fast in safe mode but extremely slow in normal mode
Exactly my problem, in safe mode, I'm able to use everything normally (but laptop overheats a lot, so its a temp workaround to be avoided)! Then following the advice there, I tried to restart in debug mode, and progressively turn on different services, but as someone suggested, MS isnt likely to be the one causing the issue, so I selected all the Windows services and I turned all of them on... Guess what, the problem is back again.
So now my question is, how do I find which service is causing the issue so that I can disable it? There are several to go for the trial-error approach, and many of them have dependencies to each other...
Thanks in advance, any help is really appreciated!