Gaming/Heat/Speed issues

Hi,

Apologies if this thread is in the wrong place, I didn't know where to put it since it covers a few areas...
A year ago I bought a Dell XPS M1710 laptop so I could play games and do college work.
It's been woprking fine until recently, when I noticed that it's been getting very slow and quite hot, despite not being in a game. I have found that if I do try to run a game, in particular Prototype, the laptop will now overheat and shut off within a minute.
The strange thing is that before I decided to downgrade Vista to XP to deal with the other speed/heat issues (I figured that the problem was Vista making my laptop slow and clunky, so I downgraded to a less-heavy OS) the game worked perfectly despite laggy patches which are a general problem and should be addressed in a patch.

Anyway, I downgraded to XP and I found that things started to run smoothly, until I opened the three programs I use mostly on my laptop at a time: Firefox, iTunes and MSN. Now, I've been running these programs fine since day one and no lag, but now I can only run one of these applications as it gets so slow that I need to switch the computer off by the power button and start again. Obviously, it gets very hot at this point.

My friend told me that maybe my laptop wasn't designed to run XP, so he advised that I might want to go back to Vista and see if the game runs. No such luck, I'm back at Vista and the game runs just as badly as before. It has also been suggested that my problem is due to the RAM starting to malfunction, but before I go out and buy more RAM/open my laptop up to install it, I need to know if it is another issue.

Can anyone here tell me what I can do to fix this?

Here are my computer specs:

Intel(R) Core 2 CPU T7400 @ 2.16GHz
3.25 GB RAM
nVidia Geforce 7950 GT

Hopefully those specs will be okay. I had some viruses but they've been cleaned off as I formatted the partition and reinstalled the OS.

Thanks guys

 

My first thoughts would be the cooling fan not working or very dirty, can you hear the fan kick in or speed up? ed

 

Yeah, the fan does kick in quite quickly... About 5 minutes after being switched on and been booted to the desktop, the fan is fairly loud as though I've just run a game.

So you think it might be a dirty fan? If so, that's brilliant, I can get that fixed fairly easily I think.

 

There's only a couple things that is common, dirty fan, no fan, and not real common the heat sink grease just dries up between the cpu and heatsink and becomes useless, this usually happens in older pc;s, maybe some canned air will do some good. ed

 

Thanks Ed, I'll give that a go... I'll post here again if it doesn't work

 

I would say tunered has given you some very sound advice

Another suggestion, buy a laptop cooling pad for when your gaming, the one I use is as thin as my laptop, it has 3 speed fans underneath and is slightly raised to maximize airflow, it is powered via USB from the laptop and has a USB ports on either side.

 

TunerEd, you are an absolute legend... Laptop is working absolutely perfectly now the dust has been cleared. Thank you so much

@ Drizzles
I have been looking briefly at cooling pads for my laptop... I think when I have more money available I'll buy one... I sort of blew all my spending money on a music festival I'm going to :-D

Thanks for everyone's suggestions

 

Glad we could help, have fun at the festival. ed

 

Lol i got confused reading these again for a minute, then I realised, you don't actually have 3.25 GB RAM, you have 4 GB of RAM, its just Vista will only recognize approximately 3.25 GBs of it, the remainder goes to the Video Card.

Just for future reference :-D