Dramatic loss in FPS for no apparent reason. NP2090

Hey all, when I recently re-installed WinXP on my np2090 two days ago, I was getting 25fps in Crysis.
Now, I'm getting 5fps in Crysis.
The only difference is I've installed steam and some steam games, but steam isn't even running while I'm playing Crysis.
My drivers are the same, the clock speeds on my card are the same, I really have no idea what cut my fps so dramatically.
Any ideas? I really prefer not having to reinstall my OS every few days to get playable fps in Crysis.

Edit: Oh yea, and my settings in Crysis are the same.

 

Have you checked to see if the steam updater is starting up automatically and running in the background? Use the task manager or the adminitrative controls utility to see whether or not any of the steam processes are starting automatically.

 

Nope, steam is completely out of the picture.

 

I ran across something similar in a Rock notebook I had lately but I noticed slowdowns booting too. In my case my secondary IDE controller (the one the HDD is attached to) had switched itself to PIO mode instead of DMA mode 5. Go into device manager and right click properties on yours. If its the same story then just uninstall the controller from the device manager and restart. Note, if the PIO mode persists after rebooting (or it happens a few reboots later) back your stuff up and save up for a new hard drive!

If it isn't that then (probably more likely to be honest) its probably a software issue. That means update ad-aware, spybot, stinger and your av software, check your process list against google (task manager is usually good enough but you may want to run hijack this) and get scanning.

EDIT: Actually it was quite apparent the hdd was the cause of the issue in the first case as the drive light was going crazy trying to load textures for bf2142 etc.

 

I fixed it by changing my video driver to 174.82.
Although I don't get why there was such a dramatic change without changing anything.

 

If you feel up to experimenting, uninstall the 174.82 driver then do a fresh install of the other driver you were using before and see if the problem persists. It's possible that one of the games you d/l-ed monkeyed with the driver (either innocently or intentionally, who knows) and left it the worse for the wear.

Keep in mind (I'm sure you do, but I like to hear myself type ) that you need to uninstall a driver before you either install a new one or re-install the old one - if you don't and you attempt to re-install the old driver, a part of the driver that is malfunctioning because its corrupted may not actually get replaced with a clean copy if the installer "sees" that it's still there and is designed to not overwrite pre-existing components.