Laptop slowing down dramatically

[drdoalot]

Recently, over the past few months, my laptop has been slowing down during games to a fairly large degree.

 

 

At first I attributed it to games simply having higher average system requirements, but today I was playing tribes with a friend with the same make of laptop, with notably lower specs, and he was running it on the same settings much more smoothly than me.

 

 

I have a i7 Q840 cpu, 6gb of ram and a GTX 460M gpu. He has the same cpu, 4gb of ram and a GTX 260M gpu, yet for some reason he runs most games more smoothly.

 

 

I am really at my wits end here, I keep my laptop uncluttered, hard drive defragged and not too full, registry is squeaky clean, I stop unnecessary startup programs and processes, etc...

 

Today, I totally cleaned up. I defragged the hard drive, deleted a TON of stuff to get it below half capacity, and turned off as many unecessary processes as I could find. It worked fine for a while, then started to get really sluggish again. What I noticed is that it's getting pretty damn hot. Too hot to comfortably touch on the bottom. Both my fans seem to be running, and I opened up the laptop to clean out the dust, but it's still getting hot quickly. I do have a coolermaster laptop fan, but it does't seem to help.

 

 

What I want to know is what is the easiest way to run benchmark tests on my components in order to determine which, if any, is running/reading slower than it should be. I just want to be able to pinpoint the source of the problem that is causing my games to run sluggishly with low FPS.

 

 

Thanking you very much in advance!

[drdoalot]

I just ran a test with speedfan. Even when almost nothing is running my processor cores are at between 65 and 70 degrees. This seems high, GPU is at 52 degrees.