Need help stopping dell gaming laptop from stuttering

[Shablagosh]

Hey tomshardware readers, I got a question for all of you. I own a dell inspiron 7559 from early 2016, the one with the i7 6700hq and 960m with the normal hdd option. When I first got this laptop it was mainly as a traveling gaming computer and laptop for class. It basically ran everything I needed no problem, virtual machines, my games, everything was pretty much exactly what I needed for 800 usd. But I would say the last 8 months or so I get random stutters I guess would be the word for it. Like the pc completely freezes for a quarter or half of a second, even the sound stutters when this happens. It can be when I'm just typing in microsoft word, when I'm in a game of league of legends or overwathc, or even just listening to pandora.

Things I have tried,
I used ddu in safemode and reinstalled nvidia drivers
I degragmented my drive, it was at 1% defragmented when I did this, also I have 400 gigs of 918 free
I ran crystaldisk, and memtest, everything came back fine
I stress tested with aida64 and found the cpu was hitting 88-90c and the 960 was hitting 71c so I used intels extreme tuning utility and turned the cpu voltage down 50mv which allowed my boost clock to stay at 3.2 and the temps were under 84c with aida running. Everything is still stable on this, and I have read I could turn it down to potentially -150mv if I wanted to.

I guess I am looking for outside the box answers to how to fix this, as I really don't want to reinstall windows, because in past experiences on my other computers just reinstalling windows didn't fix anything and I had to completely wipe the old data too, meaning pictures, homework, games, etc would need to be deleted.

Thanks in advance for any attempts to help me, I have email notifications on so I should be able to respond asap to any further questions.

Forgot to mention my antivirus is windows defender, my operating system is windows 10, and I frequently run malwarebytes also.

 

[Harsh_11]

Take your laptop to a service centre and get it cleaned up. That kind of temperature indicates that maybe there is dust buildup inside which is throttling your CPU and gpu. Also the temperature seems high for a laptop. Get it cleaned up and I think it will work

 

[Shablagosh]

Take your laptop to a service centre and get it cleaned up. That kind of temperature indicates that maybe there is dust buildup inside which is throttling your CPU and gpu. Also the temperature seems high for a laptop. Get it cleaned up and I think it will work

Hey, I can attempt that myself sometime this upcoming week. I've built multiple pcs for myself and friends over the years and I am comfortable doing that. I'm not entirely sure this is the problem though, as when watching hwmonitor while I game the clockspeeds don't go down when the stutter happens at all. I will try this, probably order some new thermal paste also, thanks for the suggestion.

 

[Harsh_11]

Ok, clean it up and update the drivers if you haven't. Update here once you done. Hope it helps. And also if you have overclocked try running at stock speed and then check if stutter occurs.