XPS m1530 format causes games to lag

Hello,

I recently formatted the main partition on my harddrive and reinstalled Windows Vista on my XPS M1530 laptop. Before this time, the laptop had been able to run most games quite well, even Crysis ran decently on medium settings.

After my reformat, I reinstalled the drivers deemed necessary by the Dell website, including the graphics driver for my 8600m gt graphics card. However, ever since the reformat, games such as crysis, company of heroes, and team fortress 2 have lagged intensely on any graphics settings (low or medium) and my laptop heats up so much that the on and around the touch-pad the heat is scorching.



My laptops basic specs are:

XPS M1530,

3582MB RAM, Intel Core 2 Duo T9500 @ 2.6 Ghz, GeForce 8600M GT

Also, the graphics card and its driver (from the Dell site) seem to be detected by dxdiag as running without problems.

Any ideas on why all games are lagging so much, and how I can fix this so I can at least play these games with reasonable framerates on reasonable settings?

Thanks so much for your help,

Loagden

 

i would update video driver dell site has very old ones this works fine for me and it the latest for our card.

NVIDIA DRIVERS 257.21 WHQL

 

I have noticed that too after a fresh install of windows 7. I noticed my fan didn't run as hard and efficiently as it did on vista. It's like I have BIOS A05 all over again. I have the 257.21 installed as well. My GPU temp spikes to 90+ when playing left 4 dead.

 

Yes, I have been seeing serious temperature spikes as well. Games start off running okay, but as I play temperature increases and performance decreases, leading to lag.