Need help with my laptop. very frustrated!!!!!

I own a Acer laptop, 1.6ghz amd duo core, 2gb ram, 120gb hd, windows xp home. with the full AVG clien - not free.

my problem is this,

i can run decent games such as BF1942 and CS:S along with garrys's mod and such,

i can play these games with no problems for about 2-3 mins. but then the games 'process usage' spikes to around 85-90%

lagging my computer badly and giving me about 5-6 fps in game, rather than the normal 45. its very frustrating.

i've defragmented both my harddrives and ran virus checks, etc.

i tried doing a factory setting restore, but it needs a password unknown to me.

something im missing? or what can i do?

ive ran my task manager just to watch the spike, and the only program adding to the cpu usage is the one im running.

any suggestions?

I own a Acer laptop, 1.6ghz amd duo core, 2gb ram, 120gb hd, windows xp home. with the full AVG clien - not free.

my problem is this,

i can run decent games such as BF1942 and CS:S along with garrys's mod and such,

i can play these games with no problems for about 2-3 mins. but then the games 'process usage' spikes to around 85-90%

lagging my computer badly and giving me about 5-6 fps in game, rather than the normal 45. its very frustrating.

i've defragmented both my harddrives and ran virus checks, etc.

i tried doing a factory setting restore, but it needs a password unknown to me.

something im missing? or what can i do?

ive ran my task manager just to watch the spike, and the only program adding to the cpu usage is the one im running.

any suggestions?

Joe_Zombie

Does your laptop get really hot when you play those games?

yes it does.

when i manage my hard drives, the overheat % stays at zero. but the touchpad and certain parts of my laptop get exceptionally hot. could heat be a problem? how do i go about cooling my system?

has it always done this?

what gpu do you hav? if you don't have one, you probably shouldn't be complaining.

my gpu is just the ATI radeon 200m.

it isnt that bad of a card.

its what my desktop had (minus the 'm') until i replaced it.

could run CS:S and HL2 just fine

heat might be the issue...are you sure you dont have any spyware running in the background ? Use Spybot Search and Destroy to remove them and also make sure you dont have many programs running at once in the background (like chat, p2p, etc)

Clean up as much unneccesary data and programs from your hard disk....Also is your hard disk almost full ? That can also have an effect sometimes.....Update ur drivers as well.