Need help finding problem...

[oldmanbabe]

Yo,

   I am having trouble running games on my laptop for more than 30 minutes at a time. I have also noticed that I have pauses in-between when I click on a video in youtube and when the screen changes. Each time one of these things happens I get a whited out screen, the turn-wheel mouse, and a not responding at the top of the screen before it suddenly pops up with the correct screen. I am having no problems with regular browsing and even websites with lots of pictures like thereifixedit.com. Does anyone have any ideas on what could be going wrong? I am leaning towards overheating but that doesn't cover the pause between videos and the random "not responding" 's I have when the temperature of my laptop is cool.

 

Laptop:

Cpu: Intel Core i7 2760QM  "Sandy Bridge"

Socket: 988B rPGA

Board: Dell O3RG89

Ram: 16 GB

 

 

P.S. The problem is bad enough I can't play minecraft for more than 30 minutes much less games like skyrim and tug.

 

 

 

 

[C0LL0SS0S]

actually it covers the random not responding, if the Heat is so high the CPU has to throttle itself, then you can get those spikes

[oldmanbabe]

Yes that might be a problem, but they happen even when the laptop is cool.

[CoronaBlue]

Are you monitoring the temperatures in any way?

[oldmanbabe]

yeah, I idle at 52-54 degrees Celcius, browse at 54-57 Celcius and game at under 78 degrees celcius

[Fliggle_Slaps]

That CPU shouldn't throttle until it gets around 100C. Since you're only getting temperatures up to 78C it shouldn't be a CPU problem, and since you have 16GB of RAM, it shouldn't be a hardware limitation. Chances are it's a software issue. How long have you had the laptop, have you installed a lot of software (may have a lot of processes running) and do you run any virus/malware scans?

 

EDIT: Has this always been an issue with the laptop, or was it working perfectly for a while and only recently started struggling?

[oldmanbabe]

It is only recently I have had problems. According to ctrl+alt+delete my computer runs at 13-15% phyical memory and the cpu is at 1-2% at idle. I have had the laptop since early 2012. I run Norton on my computer actively (doing its own thing) and I also have anti-malwarebytes that I have set to not turn on (via window startup editor) until I click on the shortcut.

[oldmanbabe]

Ends up that the problem was dust/thermal paste. I had the local pc place replace the thermal paste with "performance" paste and when I got it back I no longer had the problem