Does installing and running games slow down a laptop?

I just bought an Alienware m14x r2 for the purpose of running audio recording and music production software on it next year, when i will be working at my uncle's recording studio. In the mean time though, ive been playing some games on it, such as Far Cry 3, Saints Row 3, and Dark Souls. Ive been gaming pretty heavily, for hours at a time, but im using a laptop cooler and monitoring my temperatures to keep them in check. I still have more than half of my hard drive space empty, so the games arent taking up a ton of space. But ive heard that lots of gaming can slow down a computer. and i need my computer to run fast and smoothly enough to be able to run these music programs and audio software. Is gaming bad for my laptop or will it slow it down?

 

telling us your system spec and the temps you are getting would help the community advise further.

 

Its an Alienware M14x r2, with an intel core i5 3210m CPU. The GPU is a 1gb NVIDIA GT650m. The temps im receiving when the pc is idle is around the low to mid 50s, and when fully gaming, the high 60s and rarely the low 70s.

 

Where did you hear games can slow down a PC? Not true... move along... NEXT!

 

Yep, basically this.

Though with an asterisk: If you're using a SSD as the main OS/programs drive and you're filling that up to the brim, you'll have some performance loss associated with that. However, this only affects loading and saving speeds, and not gameplay itself (a CPU/GPU problem).

 

Just a note... you should have 2 partitions on HDD and install games on second partition.

 

Why is this important...?

 

I'm not really sure about this either. It's still a single physical drive, and you still have to wait for it to spin around to get to your data, regardless of partition. And SSDs can access everything equally fast.

 

It's not relevant.

Games do not slow down your computer - general everyday use does, over time. Your HDD/SSD performance will degrade over time and that will result in what appears to be a slower system.

There's no need to worry about it. Keep on gaming! :thumbsup:

 

if you just bought that version, why didn't you buy the newest version which is probably similar in price and has a better gpu and cpu?

 

so that when something crashes badly, you dont need to install your OS again, just remove the affected part. However, since vista there is no need for that anymore

 

It is common to have 1 partition for OS and 2-nd for Data/Storage. Also it is known that better speed is on the outter part of the plate.
And also if you install games on the C drive it may increase fragmentation level.

 

given that you cant assign specific blocks for a partition it doesnt matter.

given that in the end the drive will be fragmented and that in the end that win 7 controls defrag pretty efficiently, there isnt much of a problem. vista was less elegant regarding that.

basically those worries are for xp, that thing that people still like