Hi I have a Gateway p7011 (i think) that I bought in 2008. It has duo-core chip, 4 gig of ram and Nvidia Geforce 9800m. I am running Vista 64 bit home. The laptop worked fine until about 3 month ago, when it suddenly stared to experience extreme slowdown in 3d games. The laptop runs fine for about a minute in game, smooth as ice, after which it is suddenly very slow for about twenty seconds (running at less than 1 frame every ten seconds) . It then returns to normal speed, only for the whole thing to start over again in another minute. It does this in all games that uses 3d, even very old ones like Splinter Cell 3. I have reinstalled windows, cleaned the vents and fans in case its overheating. I even changed to older drivers, but this just caused the games to crash instead of slowing down. Can it be a virus ? AVG doesn't pick up anything, but that doesn't say much. There was a time when I was between antivirus programs, and its a possibility that the laptop could have been infected. Might it fix the problem if I format the hard-drive, something which I had not done until now ? How about upgrading to Windows 7 ? Or is this the graphics card that is going ? Thanks
