Laptop screen freezing during games

Especially lately, my laptop's screen has been freezing when I play certain video games on it. I say the screen freezes, because the sound and such still works, I just can't get any feedback, because the screen gets frozen. I'm using an HP Pavilion dv7 computer with an AMD Phenom II P920 processor with an ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5470 GPU. I got the computer over the summer, and at first everything was fine. The screen has mainly been freezing when I play Age of Empires II. I was originally using a version my friend had sent me, but I was having screen issues, so I decided to use my disk version instead. The same random freezing, less than an hour into gameplay, occurred. I noticed it also happening when I tried to run my digital version of Rollercoater Tycoon 2. I thought maybe it was linked to my Windows 7 OS and the age of the games, but I've had a digital copy of Assassin's Creed freeze, as well. Games I play with no problems include Dead Space, Civ 4, and Bioshock. I updated Windows, looked for driver updates, and ran CCleaner several times, but it ends up the same. I'm not sure if I'm missing something simple, or if there's something really wrong. Thanks for your time and help.

 

Looking for updated drivers is a good place to start (but not from MS Update!), look for them at the hardware makers sites. Also check and update any security software while you're at it .

I'm guessing that the video driver gets stuck in a loop, Windows kills it silently and reverts to the default Windows driver (which can't play the game - and this shows why not to update drivers from MS Update ). On reboot, Windows loads the latest driver once more (this can be forced through Device Manager without rebooting, too).

 

I did that and tried playing again. I made it through a two or so hour match with nothing but a real quick screen flicker, but it didn't affect anything, so I think that did the trick. Thanks a ton