Inspiron 1450 - Gaming FPS Problem

Hello,

I’m having issues playing World of Warcraft on my three year old laptop, Inspiron 1450, dual core, Vista, 32-bit, with a video card of Intel 965 Express Chipset. I’ve been having a specific problem, and neither Intel nor the World of Warcraft forums have been helpful, so I’m hoping this Inspiron-specific forum may either have seen this before or have some idea what’s causing it/what to do about it.

I’m not very computer literate, and am having a fairly specific frames-per-second/driver issue in WoW. I normally get about 6fps in high-traffic parts of the game and 16 fps when alone. This is on the very low side of being playable, and in high-traffic is considered almost unplayable. I thought Vista had been auto-updating my video drivers for the last few years, but it had not. I recently updated the drivers manually, and my fps immediately went to 20fps in high-traffic zones and 50fps alone. It was great for a few hours, and even after restarting my computer once it was fine, but when I logged out and logged in a few hours later, it was back to the old bad FPS. The drivers were still registering as the newest, updated versions, so it doesn’t seem that they’d been automatically rolled back.

I tried uninstalling and reinstalling the updated drivers, and immediately it improved again to the good fps. After playing a couple of hours that night with good fps, I shut down the computer, and tried logging on in the morning again, and it was back to the bad FPS. It has been this way for a week and a half now, where before I play everytime I have to go through the process of uninstalling and reinstalling my video drivers.

I thought it might be Windows Updater adding something that was glitching the drivers up in some way at startup, so I disabled automatic Windows Updates, uninstalled and reinstalled the updated drivers, and the same thing happened. I had good fps for a few hours, and then bad fps after leaving the computer off for a few hours and coming back to it that night.

What could be happening? I’d understand if I was just stuck with the bad fps, that it might be time for a new computer, etc., but the fact that I’m able to get good fps upon reinstalling for a few hours makes me think that this laptop is still salvageable for WoW for a while longer. Why would it go through these cycles? How can I keep the good fps without it decaying back to the old, bad fps?

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Some notes on things I’ve tried that have not worked:

-All my settings are always down to minimum, with all unnecessary stuff unchecked.
-Changed the power saving features so that it’s running as “High Performance” rather than the balance between energy saving and performance
-Contacted Intel, but they said they never heard of my specific issue and didn’t know what to do.
-Made sure to keep the laptop on a hard surface to help with cooling issues.
-Minimized starting programs (selective start-up).

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Could something I’m doing about the reinstall be affecting it? Essentially, I go into Device Manager, “Uninstall” the drivers, then open the driver install program I have saved on my desktop. It installs the updated drivers again and I restart the computer. It updates further somehow, asks me to restart the computer once more, and then I can play WoW at high fps for those few hours.

Should I be installing it differently? Like, in safe mode, or doing more than just selecting the “Uninstall” option for the drivers in “Device Manager”? Could that be corrupting it somehow?

Help me, notebook forums! You’re my only hope.

Thank you for your time! J

 

Intel 965 integrated graphics + games = does not compute.

 

True, and I know it's out of date, but why do I get these 3-4 hour bursts of great FPS every time I reinstall the drivers?

 

That is a little weird. By logic, they should just not have good framerates at all.