Laptop troubleshooting forum: Major slowness during gaming and streaming

To further complicate things, I noticed that any slowness only occurs while I'm running my high performance gpu. The built in intel graphics can stream just fine (can't run the games, but that's not what it's meant for). It's leads me to believe something is wrong with my ATI gpu, but I guess that could be explained by cooling issues as well, if the processor is limiting the speed and power of the graphics in order to prevent overheating.

Thoughts?

Is the work done yet? At 2 years that's more than long enough for junk to accumulate and for the heat sink compound to dry out and crack. We're talking 2 dollars of compound so if you do your own work this is not a matter of much money.
Bob

No, I haven't yet gotten out to get what's needed for this work. I imagine dusting it would be simple (just blow the fan without opening?). After that, I'll try to look up how to reinstall the OS without the original discs (i believe it's saved on a separate partition). If it persists, I'll come back with some questions about opening it up and adding more compound, as I'm no expert at hardware.

That should be an every other month task on gaming laptops. Didn't the seller/retailer/anyone tell you about maintenance? My bet is they didn't because they don't want to scare off the buyers.
Bob

It's been a busy couple of weeks but I finally got around to getting the canned air. I sprayed the vents for the fan and every other opening on the laptop. It seems like my video playback has improved. However, since I was still experiencing slowness during gaming and just an overall boginess (slowness is switching graphics, etc) I decided to reinstall the OS.

After this, the same slowness is still there, if not more so. I reinstalled my video driver and bios with newer versions and got all the windows updates.

What's next? Really not sure why I'm having such issues considering I have 4gb ram and a 512 mb video processor.

If the unit was never cleaned over the years then we need to open it to clean and replace the heat sink compound inside. This is not hard work for your every day laptop tech but it is something that we do too often.

I read you found it helped and sadly you didn't come back with, yes, I do that every few months since I owned the PC.
Bob

After reinstalling the OS and clearing the fans, my playback has been back to normal expectations. Wanted to wait to share the good news to make sure it was for sure.

Thanks for all the help.