Laptop performance suddenly dropping and can't tell what's causing it

Jerosser

Estimable
Aug 18, 2015
5
0
4,510
I'm having trouble identifying the cause of a sudden drop in my Laptops performance in certain games. Its a Toshiba Satellite P850-31L and with certain games it could run them very easily at their highest settings then suddenly one day at I noticed that I I had been locked to the lower settings and it now says my computer isn't powerful enough to go any higher. And the frame rate has also gone down a lot compared to how it used to perform.

For example I could run Skyrim at very high graphics settings very smoothly and the most recent total war games at the highest unit size and high unit detail.

The Anti-virus software is saying that everything is fine and there are no unwanted malware or viruses the might be causing a problem. I have also tried cleaning out the fan its defiantly not an over heating issue. The graphics drivers (Intel and NIVIDA) which came with the system are both up to date. And finally there is defiantly nothing wrong with my computers system memory.

So I was wondering if there is any other possible problems that could be causing this sudden drop in my laptops performance or a better way of identifying it?

 

Jerosser

Estimable
Aug 18, 2015
5
0
4,510
As far as I can tell there is nothing wrong with any of the games files, I ran a verify integrity check on them through steam and had ago at reinstalling some and it appears to have changed. I also noticed that is is all of the most recent and demanding games that are experiencing problems so the problem do appear to be performance related.

Is is possible that I over worked the hard drive at some point causing it to be damaged in some way? Since I vaguely remember that his started roughly after I used a mod that increased the number of troops I could use in a Shogun total war beyond what the initial game could handle and I did notice that my computer was struggling with it a little bit. Then shortly after that I noticed that the performance dropped and it became much slower even on its normal settings, then I noticed it in other games that were previously running smoothly.
 
Then yes it could be that you worked the cpu and gpu too hard. This happened to me as I used to be able to play tera at high settings. Now it can't even handle the lowest settings. That could have damaged the hdd but that is very unlikely unless your hdd is one of the lower end ones.

You could try and reapply the thermal paste.
 

Jerosser

Estimable
Aug 18, 2015
5
0
4,510
I've finally managed to find the time get hold of some thermal paste and reapplied it to the relevant places. It did look like a lot of it had warn of but even now that its been reapplied there is no visible change in my computers performance.
 
It sounds like the mod that you installed pushed the cpu and gpu too hard. Is the cpu and gpu able to keep its clock rates to the max when you play the demanding games? If it can't then they are both worn out and there is nothing you can do if this is the case unless you can replace them which is very rare.
 

Jerosser

Estimable
Aug 18, 2015
5
0
4,510
My Laptop just received the upgrade to windows 10 and it appears that the problem has gone now for some reason. I might be been that some other program was active that I could detect was taking up a massive change of my Laptops memory. Which was cleaned out during the upgrade.