Laptop suddenly performing worse

SquiddyBiscuit

It's approximately 8 months old now, and I haven't had any problems with it whatsoever - until now.
Two days ago it could run all my steam games fine on the medium to high settings, I had no issues with Firefox holding 20+ tabs open, and could keep a couple of programs running without a hitch. Yesterday though, after short plane trip with my laptop on me (so no bag monkeys had the chance to throw it around) it started performing awfully - any game I ran would run fine the first couple of seconds but start stuttering and laggign horribly even at the lowest settings and Firefox is struggling keeping just a pair of tabs open at the moment.

I've run the Seagate HD drive checker, "Sealab" or something, but it's been passing all tests and I run a full disc check through windows that showed up with no issues either.

These are my specs taken from Speccy:

Summary
Operating System
MS Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit SP1
CPU
Intel Core i5 460M @ 2.53GHz 60 °C
Arrandale 32nm Technology
RAM
4.00 GB Single-Channel DDR3 @ 532MHz (7-7-7-20)
Motherboard
Hewlett-Packard 144A (CPU) 66 °C
Graphics
Generic PnP Monitor (1366x768@60Hz)
ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5650 (HP) 61 °C
Hard Drives
625GB Seagate ST9640320AS (SATA) 51 °C
Optical Drives
hp DVDRAM GT30L
Audio
IDT High Definition Audio CODEC

Just a guess as to what might be wrong would be helpful, and any suggestions on what components I should test and how to, before I give up and send it off to support.

Synthesis

The obvious things is, depending on the model itself, that you might have too much dust in the heatsink vent? I know that used to slow down old Dell laptops I had years ago rather abruptly.

pricer

hmm, the air pressurisation from being in a plane shouldn't have affected it (as the air is sealed at an equivalent of around 6000-8000 feet, if not, your laptop would be the least of your worries). Though of all the components, the HDD is probably the most sensitive to any pressure differential - but I would imagine if it were faulty, you would know by now. Standard procedure would be to run a CHKDSK, defrag the drive etc, and view task manager to see where you are getting the performance bottlenecks.

finalflight89

Synthesis wrote:

The obvious things is, depending on the model itself, that you might have too much dust in the heatsink vent? I know that used to slow down old Dell laptops I had years ago rather abruptly.

Laptops are notorious for getting a bit too hot and then clocking the processor speed down. When it's running slowly, open up task manager and take a look at your CPU utilization percentage. It'll most likely be at 100% while being underclocked to cool it off.

SquiddyBiscuit

Hm, I re-installed Windows 7 on my laptop using the HP recovery option (finally paying off for occupying 20 gigs of my hard drive) and all my problems are solved.
Sadly, I did vacuum the vents as well so I've kinda muddled up the cause of my computer failure - and I fear it might happen again if I attribute the wrong cause to the problem.

It's either software, as it works fine after reinstall, or it could be dust like some suggested, as I vacuumed the vents.



Thanks everyone anyway for the suggestions!

Unknown

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jungleroomx

Had a friend who this happend to. He did a full re-install and it happened again.

Apparently he never switched the power settings from power saver back to performance.

(Sometimes computer issues are the dumbest things.)

SquiddyBiscuit

Update

The problem is back again, while I was playing Psychonauts

In that actress mind, when you have to switch between a bunch of stage plays

I installed Core Temp, and when doing nothing I get CPU temperatures of 48-52 C - which doesn't seem too bad.

I installed Speccy as well, and it is giving me a CPU temperature of 52 C, motherboard temp. of 55C, GPU temp of 52 C, and a hard drive temp of 38 C - which is all at rest when not running any programs (aside from firefox, and the measurement programs).

While running the game Psychonauts, at maximum resolution and all settings set to maximum (which my laptop should be capable of handling considering the age of the game) Speccy is reporting CPU/Motherboard temps of 80 C, GPU temps of 61 C, and HD temp of 39 C. Core Temp is also reporting CPU temp of 79-80 C.

Temperatures of 80 C sounds pretty bad, so I've ordered some compressed air and will give my laptop a go with it in order to clear out some potential dust inside of it.

Any other suggestions?

EDIT: 15 minutes later, the temps have crept up (at rest) 5 Celsius across all measurements.

Pariel

You're probably onto the right solution for it. Have you looked at task manager at all?

grouch993

One of my kids has an HP laptop. It started overheating and it appears to have been corrected by running the vacuum and compressed air over the ventilation ports.

We do it every three months now just to be safe.

Synthesis

Yeah, I remember 7 years ago, on a Dell Inspiron, heat slowdown would literally just lower the clockspeed of the CPU (which would come back on its own, with no alert or anything). Very cryptic.