serious performance issues on my inspiron 1705/9400!!

Hi guys, i know it's weird, but recently i've been encountering some serious performance issues in all almost all games on my dell inspiron 1705/9400 with nvidia 7900gs. Allmost every game is unplayable now due to some heavy framerate slowdown even the likes of UT2004 and HL1. It's really puzzling me, as just last week i was playing gears of war and CoD4 on 1024x728 resolution with everything on high without any problems. Any idea what this could be? any help would be highly appreciated...

 

Any crashes, new software installs, Over Clocked?

I assume all was OK until what? Just out of the blue?

I'm still on my original OS install, OC the GPU without many problems so keep the faith untill we find out if you have a hardware or software issue.

So, a little more info may give us a clue to help you out.

 

no, nothing of the sort, there're no crashes and i havn't installed any new software, and ther're no programs running in the background, it all happened suddenely, and i just can't get it!!
and yeah..i have the original 84.63 drivers installed from the dell website, but these've been working fine with all kinds of games, both old and new( UT2004, HL1, deus ex, Bioshock, stalker, oblivion, gears of war, ET:QW....even crysis with absolutely no problems whatsoever...

 

Get the newer drivers, especially for the recently released games. New drivers also fix patches in older versions that you don't know about. I recommend either 169.04 or 169.09.

 

agreed, the newer drivers would possibly make things better, but the problem is that it's happening to all games and not just the new ones!, UT2004 is almost unplayable now with the framerate hovering around 5-10fps, even though it's pretty dated game, could it be a compatibility problem? any other suggestions?

 

sure, i'm not giving up on it, even though i tried everything i could, still nothing changed..

 

Well, I would not change anything, such as video drivers, if every thing was working fine a week before. You may get into trouble with them.

If you have installed/removed nothing, try a restore point around or before your problems started. You can always revert back. If you got something eating CPU cycles, you might run task manager in the back ground to see if anything is pegging your cpu. You may have malware infection?

If all else fails, back up your files and use the OS restore disks and wipe your drive. A bit draconian but it may be a great time saver if you got some kind of software corruption. This is what Dell will want, to rule out software. You can also run your hardware test at boot up. I forget the key combo but you can Google it. This will test your hardware including ram, GPU and CPU for any major problems.

Good LucK!

 

Overheating perhaps? Probably a long shot based on what you're describing, but it's possible. Did you change the surface you put your laptop on or anything?

If a clean reformat and driver updates don't fix the problem, you can be pretty positive that it's a hardware issue so I'd do what the guy above me suggested just to rule it out.

 

Excellent advice. Use system restore to go back to a point where your system was working properly. Try one that was made before the problem started, then go further back until you find a point that works.

This has saved me countless times. If it doesn't work, and a system reformat doesn't work, there is a good chance that it is a hardware problem.

Also, have you ever overclocked your video card?

 

Do i need to back up my newly installed files(music albums and documents) if i want to perform a system restore? i hope this works anyway, thanks for the help guys, i really appreciate it

 

no overheating issues, the temprature's hovering around the 60's, and i've never overclocked my GPU and everything's working just fine, oh wait..last week i started played gears of war and there was some severe slowdown even in the menues, and then i tried CoD4 and my other games and the same happened, so i restarted my system and everything was back to normal...however i tried restarting but it didn't solve the problem. Anyway i'll try a system restore, and hopefully it'll do the trick

 

Have you checked your powermizer settings?

 

yeah, and i set it off, still the same problem. however, i'll perform a system restore to see if it fixes the problem, if i notice any changes i'll report back!