Heya guys, thanks for taking the time to read this.

For the past three weeks or so, I've been getting this issue: I'll be mid-game (I've experienced this in everything from TF2 to L4D to Burnout Paradise) and for twenty seconds or so, I'll drop to anywhere from 2 to 12 FPS, then all of a sudden my 50-70 FPS will resume. Multiplayer or singleplayer, and in TF2 it was accompanied by a ping spike of 50-70 ms going up to 200 ms on the same net graph that was showing my FPS. In any case, the game just becomes unplayable for that twenty seconds or so, and this is a recurring thing. Once it starts (say, 20 minutes after booting up said game) it happens every couple of minutes.

I've had this computer for a few years now. It's an ASUS M70V laptop, Intel Core 2 Duo (P8600, 2.4GHz), 4GB RAM, running 32-bit Vista.

I've had Norton run a full system scan, which turned up nothing. I've defragged, deleted gigabytes and gigabytes of stuff and defragged again, and none of that stopped the issue.

Would any of you more experienced users or IT pros be able to assist a floundering user? Many thanks.

Few year old laptop you say? What you've been looking for is a software problem when I'd bet it's a hardware one.

Sounds like either the cooling is going or dust is blocking airflow, making things overheat or your hard drive is losing the will to live.

That's what I was afraid of. I'm trying to find out if it could be anything other than it just getting 'too old'. Unfortunately laptops weren't made to be taken apart, so I can't clean out the air vents.

Anything I could to do give it a break or let it cope better?

Who said that?

Some notebooks are easy to open and clean and some aren't.

If you can't open the notebook I recommend reading this/similar threads.
http://forum.notebookreview.com/asus-ga ... -cans.html

Btw, do you have any kind of cooling system (aside from fans in the notebook), like farther side of the notebook elevated or cooling pad?

A clean system install might be you last refuge.

I will try elevating the far side, that should help a bit.

Would wiping it and installing Win7 be a good idea then? Or ultimately not worth the money and effort?

Clogged system should not make problems temperature-wise, only possibly slowing down some applications and system (but you won't gain that many fps from there). Still, the biggest problem is the dust. Install some kind of GPU temperature monitor and check what works for you (elevating side etc.). The spike is caused by the GPU underclocking (thus decreasing performance) and when it cools down it gets back to its original frequency (normal performance). Either way, you need to get that dust off your notebook.

When I haven't had my cooling pad I elevated it with 2 really thick books, it helped A LOT.

Sry to say this but .. Norton? Srsly? Still someone using that shit? Get rid of Norton and try again..

Thanks, Nemko.

*sigh* Alright. Fine, tell me why...

It usually costs money, takes too much system resources and its..Norton.

That was the bit I expected you to explain, but obviously that's not your inclination. I'm therefore not going to change anything.

Nemko where did you get your cooling pad from? Or where can decent ones be obtained? It's something I've never looked at before, I have to admit.