Is this some kind of virus/malware on my laptop, or is it just a default system message?

Question

Ever since my laptop crashed due to a Critical Structure Corruption, the pop-up in the screenshot appears after rebooting. I Googled if that shows up in other cases and noticed the font and grammar don't look standard.

The name of the pop-up is "System Settings Change" and the body says:

Your hardware settings have changed. Please reboot your computer for these changes to take effect !!

(spacing and exclamation points are exactly as included)

I suspect it's some kind of virus or malware but my protection (AVG and MalwareBytes) didn't catch anything. Has anyone else encountered something like this?

The laptop is an ASUS x550z running Windows 10 Home Edition.

Following Twisty's suggestion, I used Process Explorer to look at what was running the pop-up.  It seems atieclxx.exe is responsible, but this one seems to be a duplicate of another process?

Answer 1

Update: I am now not overly confident this could be a malicious process. Reading up on multiple forums people have stated by performing a correct install of their Graphics Card Driver has rectified this solution. Perhaps find the correct driver for your model of laptop, which I believe may be any of the following:

AMD Radeon® R5 M230 + Radeon® R7 M270 DX Dual Graphics with 2GB DDR3 VRAM Built-in FX-7600P

AMD Radeon® R5 M230 + Radeon® R7 M265 DX Dual Graphics with 2GB DDR3 VRAM Built-in A10-7400P

AMD Radeon® R5 M230 + Radeon® R7 M260 DX Dual Graphics with 2GB DDR3 VRAMBuilt-in A8-7200P

I see you've located what we suspect the process is that is generating this message. In my personal experience, there is another process that generates/builds this *.exe with a random name.

Step 1 - Delete the Files

Locate the file (you should be able to right-click on the process and open location) and then simply delete it. I would suggest looking in the %temp% directory, %appdata% directory and possibly run shell:startup and see what you find here.

Step 2 - Try to boot into a live environment

The next step would be to boot into a live environment, use a tool like Hiren, and then run one of the many Anti-Virus tools here - RootKit Revealer, Avira CLI and perhaps even ComboFix if still supported.

If this does not find any malicious items, then boot back into Windows normally. If this does find malicious content, I would recommend performing the steps again after you've cleaned the PC to ensure it worked.

Step 3 - Remove Permissions to the Directory

If the process continues, I would recommend removing permissions from the file itself (therefore, not allowing it to be executed by any account on the system). Perform a reboot and then see if the popup error continues. Whilst not necessarily a "fix", it should prevent the executable from actually executing!

Lastly, I did some "Googling" of the message and note some users experience the same error. I note some state this is more a pop-up generated by your GPU, as Windows 10 has installed a non-compatible driver - source is here.

Answer 2

I've gotten this error message twice now, on a laptop with AMD hardware that was upgraded to Windows 10. According to an AMD employee giving support to this same issue on their official forum, this error message is a symptom of corrupt drivers, and can be solved by doing a clean install of the latest drivers.

Typically this error message, 'Hardware Settings Have Been Changed' means that you need to perform a clean installation of the latest drivers

My guess is that the automatic driver update feature of Windows 10 is somehow breaking the AMD driver installation, and this can only be fixed with a reinstall.

The latest AMD drivers can be downloaded from http://support.amd.com/en-us/download.

Answer 3

I had the same problem but stopped it very easy by doing the following. Go into "Run" or use windows-R buttons and type in msconfig and the click on "services" and then untick "AMD external events utility". This WILL stop the problem from occuring.