Games freeze and audio stutters?

Tbone192

Estimable
Apr 12, 2014
2
0
4,510
For the last year and a half or so my laptop has been getting increasingly worse at running games. It freezes with most games after only a few minutes and the audio stutters in a loop (of what seems to be the last sound played before the crash). It crashes with games like TF2, Bioshock, Garry's Mod, and LoL but it doesn't seem to crash for "smaller" games like PvZ and FTL. Even CSGO seems to work most of the time.

Also it used to give me an error saying something like "the Nvidia driver has crashed and recovered" but I haven't seen this in awhile.

I recently re-applied the thermal paste and cleaned out the heat sink as my laptop was getting fairly hot before but this didn't fix the problem. I've run multiple virus scans and the FurMark graphics test for like 15 minutes with no problems. I've also rolled back the drivers, updated them etc.

My battery capacity is at like 17% but I have it plugged in all the time. Every other component passes my hardware tests besides the battery. Could a weakened battery / power supply cause these problems?

Dell XPS L502X
RAM 6gb
Processor: Intel Core i7 - 2620M CPU 2.70 GHz
GPU: GeForce GT 540M
DirectX 11.0
Windows 7

I don't know a ton about computers so if there's any other info necessary please let me know. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Edit: I'm not sure if this is relevant but also when I first boot up my computer it takes awhile to load and the first time I launch Firefox since turning the computer on it takes almost a full minute to load and becomes unresponsive halfway through but then once I get over that "hump" it runs fine.