Why do my games occasionally lag for a short time?

I've recently had this happen to all newer games I try to play on my laptop. It's an Asus G50V with the following specs:


Windows 7 Home Premium 32-bit


Intel Core 2 Duo T9400 (2.53GHz)


4GB DDR3 RAM


NVidia GeForce 9700M GT





The last game it played just fine was dragon age 2. Games like minecraft also don't cause any problems. Crysis 2 and Portal 2 however, have been giving me the same treatment constantly. The fps drops to 5 and below for about 20 seconds, every 5 minutes or so, and then it just goes back up to normal, playable values. Here's a list of the things i've already tried:





Installed all windows updates


Installed latest GeForce drivers


Installed latest version of directX


Defragmented the registry and both hard drives


De-installed all useless programs and turned of everything I don't need.


Set the priority of games to high in the task manager


Increased the page file size to 2x the amount of RAM on minimum and 4X on maximum





The old beast is generating quite a lot of heat, but I opened the case up two months ago to give it a full cleaning. Afterward I had no problem playing both Assassins Creed Brotherhood and Dragon Age 2, so it seems hard to believe that heat is still a problem. Any thoughts guys?|||Do you have a 5400 RPM HDD? That was the problem for me. Set your laptops power settings to "high performance", or replace the HDD with a 7200 RPM one.|||because the more hotter your pc get the lesser performance. and also about the setting you use in it.

and also some games are very bad coded. like gta IV.

o and one tihng. you processor is really weak. buy a core i3 or i5 that will solve all the lag.

and if you have virus in the pc remove it and defrag registry etc.|||Your system may be congested. Clean it with reginout to make it lean %26amp; quick and reduce lag.|||Possibly it might be your CPU. Core 2 duo's are good but not for serrious gaming, if you want games that run smooth then go for core 2 quad and i series. all you other specs look fine. oh..and also try 64bit version of whindows so that you can make use of the full capacity of you ram, casue i presume with that 32bit of windows you have there you might be using only 3GB of the 4GB of ram you have installed.