Really slow gaming performance all of the sudden

I havnt played any games on my laptop for a few months now...

but now that ive got the latest expansion pack for AOE I am starting to pay that again...

But the performance is suddenly extremely slow.. less than 5FPS where I used to get great performance before with the same settings.

I tried 3dmark 06 and I only got between 1-2FPS .

well... I know 3dmark was slow anyway.. but I defo had much better performance before..

I have a Core 2 Duo @ 2.16ghz, 2GB of RAM and a Mobility Radeon X1600...

Now the thing is.. ive noticed that when playing games my laptop fan will spin down as if to say its not doing anything at all.

I left 3dmark going fo a few mins and the fan spun down. It as if the system isnt using all of its hardware resources to run 3D applications :S. Before when playing games it was always spinning.

Ive tried updating my Cats from 7.8 to 7.9's and ive checked the clock speed for my CPU to be at the full 2.16ghz using CPUZ

and now im out of ideas

Can anyone point me in a direction of what to try next?

 

No worries Ive fixed it...

It was ATI's PowerPlay down clocking the GPU even though the power was plugged in...

Disabled power play and now im back to normal speeds

 

Thanks for at least posting your solution. I hate it when someone asks a good question that could help others, and even though they figure it out, you have no idea how to fix it if you have the same problem.