Long suffering lappy user desperately seeking help

[Guest daveeee]

Hi, I'm not exactly new to these forums as I've browsed them before for some excellent tips and tricks to flog the most out of my proverbial dying horse. My problem basically is one that's been listed here before, the one about random fps drops in games. The only game that I play, however, is Counter Strike which is old and previously ran perfectly on my laptop with no problems.

Recently it started to do this annoying 20 odd second drop of fps to about 10 every 5 minutes or so. I've tried the compressed air trick and it may have helped a bit, but to be honest the problem's still there. I don't actually use an nVidia card, so I understand it might be a cheeky asking on an nVidia forum, but you guys seem to know your stuff so hopefully there'll be someone in the same boat as me!

I have an Athlon (Mobile) XP 2000+ which is maxed out to 1600 with SpeedSwitch XP, 700 odd megs of RAM and a 64meg Radeon Mobility U1. All this runs Windows XP Pro with SP2 installed. If anyone can help me I'd really appreciate it, as would my clan (so I can stop hiding behind my fps drops to explain missed shots, hehe)! Please bear in mind that this never happened initially, and I have recently formatted my hd, so I don't think it's anything I've installed, or a trojan or whatnot.

[Bill]

It sounds to me that maybe somehow there is still some dust clogged up in there.

Is there a way to check your temps?

Have you ever opened any part of your laptop up to check for dust bunnies?

You might be very surprised at the amount of dust that could possibly be in there.

Anybody else have any ideas?

If this issue really is a heat issue that lots of people are getting, then some series heatsink/laptop mods might be needed to fix it............ :)

People used to do those when upgrading to certain cards in certain laptops, like replacing part of the metal on the card or something.

[®®®]

:) Welcome to the darkside, daveeee

I think what Bill wrote sounds reasonable and i cannot imagine that anything else than heat is responsible for the temp. loss of performance (frame drop) of your card.

[Bill]

Try searching around on the Dell Inspiron video forums for threads about it, I saw topics where people did mods when upgrading to the Quadro Go GL 700, so do some searches on that one.

There are even guides complete with pictures and lists of what hardware you might need for such modifications.

In the meantime, try running the laptop somewhere really cold, like have lots of giant fans pointed at it, or find a way to run it in a freezer (external keyboard, mouse, monitor, and power cords coming out from your laptop in the freezer/frig possibly? :) :) )

Maybe you could stick an ice pack on the laptop's keyboard, and then use an external keyboard, just make sure the laptop doesn't get wet.

You could also use dry ice, as it goes straight from a solid to a gas, so no liquid to fry your laptop.

While this would not be a good idea for laptops, some people have even submerged their PCs in non conductive liquid (vegatable oil even works) and then threw in some liquid nitrogen/dry ice and a pump system and started overclocking.

I strongly suggest not trying that yourself unless you are an expert at such things, I take no responsibility if you brake your laptop, but here are some funny pics anyway.

http://www.markusleonhardt.de/en/oelbilder.html

This right here is the ultimate submerged OC, the only bad thing is though, is that it is really old, I don't really know how high you could, say, OC a P4 with that, but I guess back then it was impressive, but I don't think I had even known about OCing back then.....

http://www.octools.com/index.cgi?caller=ar...submersion.html

These guys used some pretty outrages stuff too...

Sad thing is, my old laptop runs circles aound their super OCed desktop PC.

[HexploR]

Ok, i don't have problems with heat but somehow connected to sound in cstrike. From time to time I have 1 sec lag when somebody is shouting smth like "fire in the hole!" or othe default phrases.