Problems when gaming, FPS dramatically fluctuates

Hi guys, I've got a problem with my Inspiron E1505 and I was wondering if anyone knew how to fix it. I got my laptop last summer. It's worked great until a couple months ago. When I start playing games (normally World of Warcraft), sometimes the screen will blink, and I will lose about 20-30 fps. After a period of 5-15 minutes, the screen will blink again, and everything will be back to normal. This screen blinking continues for the entire time I play and it's getting annoying. I only play a few games, but this mainly happens when I play World of Warcraft, but not when I type essays or surf the web. I have a 1.73 GHz Duo Core processor and 2 GB of RAM. OS is Vista. If anyone knows what the problem is, please help me out. Thanks!

 

check your background tasks when lock up happens. It sounds like a background process is using all of the resources on your machine for a short while.

Disable all of the background services you don't need and let us know what you find. Also ensure your rivers are up to date, use the 174.31 driver from here.

 

Thanks for the response radditz, Ill try that when I get home. I'm on the library computer at school atm.

edit: Something that I recently noticed was that when I pull out the power cord out during the time my computer suffers from the performance loss after the screen blink, my fps does not go down any farther. Before this problem, if I pulled out my power cord when I was playing WoW I would experience a large fps dip (I think this is normal) similar to what happens after my screen blinks. I'm not sure if this is related in anyway, but I just wanted to throw this out there.

 

could your video card be overheating?

 

is there any way I can see what temperatures my laptop is running at? It seems to run really hot most of the time. I'm thinking about buying a cooling pad and seeing how that goes.

 

try this program:
http://www.diefer.de/i8kfan/index.html

 

you could also use rivatuner to check the temperatures. There is a nice guide somewhere on the forums on how to use it, but it is pretty straight forward.