low frame rates in games.

so i have a Dell XPS m1530 and ive had it for 3 years now and im played alot of WoW on it, in its day. but i am now a college student and spend some time now and then playing some Starcraft II or League of Legends. but they both seem to get really low frame rates randomly.. i just upgraded to windows 7 64bit and ive gotten all the newest drivers for everything. can anyone tell my why this might be happening? i have 4gb of ram the nvidia 8600 and all that jazz i mean it should run fine....

 

well the nvidia 8600 is fairly old, starcraft II is a brand new game.. I don't think its any specific sort of issue, just that your hardware is outdated... :/

 

well i mean it should run better than it does cause league of legends used to run smooth and then out of nowhere it started running slower

 

That would indicate it's about time for a clean reinstall of Windows 7...

 

And maybe consider taking it apart to clean out the fans. It could be overheating and thus downthrottling.

 

well when i said i just upgraded to windows 7 64bit i meant like 2 days ago... so thats pretty fresh.. ya im not smart enough to take my computer apart and clean it... wish i was..

 

Upgrading is not a clean install, in fact, upgrading can cause more problems than before. That is why I always recommend a clean (custom) install.

As for cleaning the laptop, you should definately do that, and it's actually pretty simple for this model. Here are some instructions:

Documentation

 

i did a custom install with windows 7 cause i went from 32bit vista to 64bit 7 so im pretty sure that was a clean install and thank you for the link to cleaning i will have to do that as soon as i get some free time in my college schedule...

 

Let us know how it looks like under there, if there is a lot of dust, it should make a big difference.

 

If the performance was better on vista 32bit then I would recommend trying a different version of the graphics driver. Although the latest version of the drivers should work better but there's no harm in trying an older version just to eliminate the possibility of driver problems. I am guessing the 64bit drivers are conflicting. Also check for performance issues and make sure all device drivers are installed and are up to date by going into device manager.

Hope that helps.

 

I had to undervolt my M1530 to keep the CPU from throttling. Try out ThrottleStop or RMclock and see if that helps. I found around 80 Celsius is where mine started getting slow.