Help on performance of laptop!

[Tanvir Hasan Shaon]

I have HP 15 jo37tx laptop with core i7 4700MQ, Geforce 740M Nvidia (2GB) with intel HD4600 built in, 4Gb ram. Using Windows 8.1 64 bit.
Now since I am quite noob so I got some questions....
Can I play high spec games here? If not what do you suggest?

Recently I tried Crysis 3 and this worked smooth. But a few days later I updated my laptop OS to windows 8.1 (and also a complete windows update) and I started to have feeling about the laggy performance. The games I played earlier without any problem showing LOW ON MEMORY error messages now! (crysis 3 stopped working so I couldnt compare its performance)
I also tried watch dogs and also have the same problem of lag (I don't feel its graphics problem.) At normal without any application running just after the computer starts, the memory remains at 37% or somewhere near. Disk usage remains 0 to 20%. If I start firefox memory usage jumps to 51%. Any game makes it 85% above!! Disk usage always remains 90 to 100% for games or apps!
Now theses problems mostly started after the windows update to 8.1.(Had a clean update)
Moreover I feel my laptop ran well before the update. (BTW, I am using avast AV ). Now I am not totally sure about what is actually causing the performance problem whether its update or something else.

What do you think or suggest to maintain performance of my laptop?

 

[i7Baby]

Laptops don't like change. You shouldn't have updated Windows.

Go into Control Panel, Device Manager and click on every device to make sure its working then update it's driver.

Make sure your laptop is running cool - remove covers and blow out the case and then use a laptop cooler.

Run checkdisk/repair on your hard drive.