Toshiba laptop performance problem, help!

[Jonny813]

Hardware:
Satellite P-100 (Custom Order from Toshiba)
Core2Duo 1.73 GHz
2 Gig Ram
nVidia GeForce Go 7600GS
80 Gig 5400 RPM HD
Vista Business
Note: I have just about every single Vista and Aero goody turned off.

Problem:

During applications like games, Warcraft, Half Life, even Starcraft. The performance is steady and all of a sudden it skips, watching FPS it basically drops in half for a split second, then comes back, then does it every couple of seconds.

Now, this has happened since I bought it about 6-8 months ago. This is my first decent laptop and I was playing with settings to try and fix it. I thought it was just not having it on good power settings, changed, nothing. Well, then I thought maybe I had game settings too high or it was too demanding, well, it was just as prominent in Starcraft as all the others... So I monitored temps and usages while playing when I saw it. GPU and CPU got no where near over heated (and I do not over clock). I noticed on most occasions the Hard Drive was shooting up to 100% usage?! But when I used Vista 'advanced' Task Manager (Resource Monitor), and watched what was causing this and could not find anything out of the ordinary.

This may or may not be related or not, but half of the time the performance picks of for a little bit, the HD starts spinning for a second or two.

I tried to give as much detail as possible and I know this is still pretty vague as I am stumped. This is my last attempt before I contact Toshiba and dream of them helping me.

Possibilities? "Bad" Hard Drive? Poor HD? Vista problem? Is there any other information I can give to help find a problem? Any suggestions would be great!

Thanks

 

[pjumpleby]

could be that you need to clean the fans if the computer is doing an intensive task the processor heats up if the fans arn't cooling properly the processor throttling kicks in and the cpu runs slower but cooler until its cool enough then the cpu is throttled back up again.

the computer could be swapping data pages between HDD and RAM but never that badly enough to cause that much performance loss.

could also be a vista problem. sorry to be so vague just listing the usuall suspects

 

[craxx123]

Cooling is a must when playing graphics intense games on a laptop. Do you use a cooling pad? If not, suggest to get one and I would keep the heatsink cooling ports clean as well as the heatsink fins. Buy a can of dust off and use it on a regular basis.