Odd slowdown problem

Had my notebook for roughly a year now, still works fine. For whatever reason, I've been noticing a weird slow down effect while playing 3d games. Stuff that should and always did load and display smoothly don't anymore. The best way I can describe it, is if you were driving a new car, and it has a smooth acceleration from 0-60. You drive it and after awhile, you notice it doesn't accelerate smoothly anymore it jerks. Like you depress the gas pedal like normal, and it takes the car a second to realize it's suppose to accelerate, then it jerks to the proper speed instead of getting there in a smooth motion.

It's not viruses or spyware, I am absolutely positive of that. Not junky programs I've installed into the computer, it's still relatively clean of crap except for stuff I installed as soon as I got the notebook. Ran a defrag, highly doubt it's that. It's not other programs I run in the background, cause I rarely ever run more than two things at once anyway, and I've always run those two things. It's definitely not overheating. Is there any other common pitfall I may be overlooking? Really trying to avoid reformatting it to fix whatever's causing it.

 

What GPU do you have?
What are your temps while gaming? Check with HWMonitor: http://www.cpuid.com/hwmonitor.php
If your temps are high, get a can of canned air and dust out all the fans and vents on the laptop. I think you've got a thermal issue.

And though I agree it doesn't sound like a software issue, to say you're positive it's not spyware or viruses is foolish. The craziest things cause the craziest problems all the time.

 

I say I'm positive it's not spyware and viruses because I hardly ever access anything that can give me that kind of stuff. I don't browse at all on the notebook, the only things it ever connects to the internet for are windows updates, virus/spyware updates, ventrilo and one online game, which does not use torrents for updates, just the game's software itself, which I have every reason to believe is relatively secure. And I still run virus/spyware checks regularly.

I also doubt it's overheating because the temperatures it currently runs at around about the same as when I was using it three months ago (I say about because the difference is 1-2 degrees celcius on load, and it's considerably warmer this time of year than it was in the dead of winter. It's in fact, stayed within 2-3 degrees of when I first got the notebook, always checked using the same program (HWMoniter). I just checked the fans and vents, and it didn't require cleaning, though I did anyway just to be really obsessive compulsive.

One odd thing I did notice, is when I took out the keyboard to clean it too while I was doing the vents, is there appear to be odd yellow stains on the steel frame underneath the keyboard. I really don't know where the heck that came from, any ideas? I have never spilled coffee into the machine; I don't even drink anything but water unless I'm out at a restaurant at any rate. Think it could be related?