Strange FPS loss during games

Hi I have a problem that has been driving me nuts. I'm running on Vista, 1GB ram, AMD Turion 1.6 GHz processor, and for a year or so everything has been just fine. But recently, whenever I play a game, for some reason half the time it runs fine, and the other half it slows down to a crawl, making games literally unplayable. I thought it was malware so I made a post in the malware section, but chaslang took a look at my scan logs and assured me that it wasn't malware. I'm at a loss as to how to fix this, as my processes don't show any other programs taking up much memory. Is one of my processes taking up more memory then it shows, or is there some Vista service that is out to get me? I've attached a list of the processes I'm running, in case that helps at all. Please help me with this if you can.

 

At the bottom it notes that you're using nearly half your available physical memory. Do you have a seperate video card? If not then that's where the rest is going and why you're getting choppy FPS. I have the same problem.

 

Ok here's a list of my startup programs

 

You can turn off Adobe Speed Launcher, it's useless and just costs memory. The Quickstart for Open Office can probably go as well.

 

Turn off the QuickTime Task, Steam, and GoogleTalk as well.

 

I turned all those off, still having slowdowns. Should I turn off more? (Is there any startup program I need all the time?) Or do you think it is something else.

 

I also tried turning off windows vista aero theme and super-antispyware, the second and third most memory hogs, and I still have the problem. Is it possible this is a video card issue, like it is overheating?

 

Yes, it is. Everest is a great program for checking on temperatures.

 

you might even want to downgrade to windows xp, vista is a system hog even though it does have some nice features, plus xp uses less memory then vista.

 

Yay it's fixed! Everest showed it was running a lot hotter during slowdowns, so I tried propping up my laptop and setting a fan to run air underneath it, and the slowdowns are gone! Thanks everyone for you help!