The intel management engine components slowing down pc is a preinstalled spyware that has been included in all the intel based personal computers from last couple of years. It is supposed to monitor various aspects of your PCs performance and usage, however it has been known to harm performance drastically by consuming RAM & CPU cycles on its own.
Why are intel management engine components slowing down pc?
This leads to a question that why intel has integrated such spyware/malware in its computers. Well, intel management engine components slowing down pc is nothing but the reminiscence of the cold war era when nsa wanted access to every bit and byte of information about users activities. The reason for this was simple – they probably never trust any hardware manufacturer.
This is the reason for which, during that time microsoft got into an agreement with nsa which allowed them backdoor access to their encryption allowing the NSA to peek into all of their users activities without a warrant or a court order. However this was limited to windows based computers only as apple and linux servers weren’t much in demand.
With the time microsoft became very successful with 90% market share of windows based computers and now it was becoming hard for nsa to monitor all their activities, they went on to seek access into intel management engine components slowing down pc which is one of the most important hardware component in your PC as it not only contains your bios settings but also reads and writes your hard-disk.
There is an embedded firmware in the intel management engine components slowing down pc which runs as a background process known as ME (Management Engine). This firmware has its own memory mapped input/output address space separate from the system’s RAM, meaning that it can function without having direct access to anything stored on the system.
This is because ME firmware needs to be able to execute its own program instructions even when the OS (Operating System) does not have control over it. This means that those system calls which tend to check whether OS has privileges or those OS related security mechanisms such as ASLR (Address space layout randomization), DEP (Data Execution Prevention) etc none of them exist for ME firmware.
ME firmware can also access RAM memory directly, even though it is being used by the OS at the same time without informing the latter about it. So if any malware was to gain control over this component, it will have a free run of all your system’s data and could do whatever it wants.
It should be mentioned that this has always been done in the past by other vendors; IBM did it for decades, Apple did it with Darwin (later known as macOS), Microsoft did it through Windows 10, all of them without informing their users about what they’re doing. So there’s nothing special about intel management engine components slowing down pc.
How to fix it?
There are two ways to fix it, one is by disabling the intel management engine components slowing down pc which will allow you to have your system back in action, however this will mean that if your bios issues any update for itself then you won’t be able to install them.
The second method would involve installing a custom firmware like coreboot, while this will give you full control of your bios and it will protect it from updates, but the downside is that the system might become unstable due to lack of proper drivers for some hardware.
It’s up to you which one you would like to go with and also do keep in mind that intel management engine components slowing down pc doesn’t monitor or record your activities, it only protects itself from malicious intruders.
If you get any errors related to intel management engine components slowing down pc then you should consider checking if there’s anything wrong with the hardware causing these issues otherwise, you need to take a backup of your data and re-install the OS using manufacturer’s recovery disc to restore your PC back to factory settings and then install the latest available drivers for your system.
Do let us know which method you went through in order to fix intel management engine components slowing down pc and also if you were able to successfully apply this fix or not by sharing your experience with us in the comments section below.