So my laptop is a 6 year old Acer laptop, nothing special really, just a pretty average laptop. Now I'm having some issues with playing games on it.

First, I got XCOM Enemy Unknown/Within a few weeks back, when it was free with the Joystick awards thing. It ran pretty good on lowest settings and on the second highest resolution. However, jump ahead to 8 hours in, lowest settings and lowest resolution it runs like garbage. It's jerky, it chugs, the music skips and stutters and is pretty much unplayable, even though it's a TBS game, it's still so bad I have a hard time playing it.

Second: Fallout 3... When I first got this game I ran it lowest settings and the resolution my laptop runs in. It ran amazingly well for around 22 hours or so... now it's just slow, stuttery, the textures don't seem to load, they just become blurry and smudged, it runs at an impecable 10 fps on the lowest resolution. I've taken mods out of the equation and nothing.

I can list so many other games where it seems once I reach a certain play time the game just doesn't load and doesn't play the same... Any ideas what's going on? I've tried restarting both games to see if it had to do with the save file having to much to remember and nothing changes... It's really bothering that I'll buy a game and only be able to play it for a few hours than it craps out, even if those few hours are amazing...

any ideas what to do other than get a new laptop?

Might still be the save games. Some saves get bloated as in very big and some have a lot of junk data in them. If you're on the lower end of the requirements that can be a serious problem when you have played a while.

Oh and in any Bethesda game there is no such thing as a clean save. Install a mod, save, uninstall the mod, save and there will still be bits and pieces left in the save from the mod.

Edit: Bethesda games are known for getting save game bloat and getting save files corrupted.

Since I have an Acer Aspire laptop for the past 7 years on which I do all my work and gaming I can tell you that I never ran into a problem such as yours. Maybe if you list what kind of hardware you have or what your big memory hogs are than it would be easier to find out, but like this it could be anything. Besides when the jerkiness starts did you ever try to make a quick restart just to see if a freshly booted windows will make any difference? Do you clean your laptop regularly, I clean mine every couple of months and I'm always astonished how much dust I get out of the vents, so it could be that after a prolonged time of use your CPU/GPU gets too hot

How much ram do you have? and how much Virtual Memory do you have set up?

This i would consider very important, as when it starts to use Virtual Memory you will notice a huge slowdown... Personally i've disabled Virtual Memory on all my computers... No need for it after you have 4+Gigs of ram...

Impossible to judge from here, if I had to make a guess you picked up some program/process/service (virus or not) that uses up your resources in the back, maybe even a bitcoinfarmer.
I would run a thourough Malwarebytesscan if I were you and if it doesn't come up with anything try to find the program/process/service responsible.

Yeah that could be...

I've gotten mostly used to what programs have to be running in the background, and forcibly kill ones that don't need to be there... And turn off services i don't need on. As for extra malware, that's a little harder to manage...

BitCoin Farming?? First i've heard of that...

BitCoin Farming is a malware program that runs in the background and uses your GPU at 100% to farm for bitcoins. Happened to be somewhat popular while a Watchdogs torrent was on the loose :)

Yeah, glancing at it, it's trying to create hashes/codes that are used for bitcoins, but the amount of energy needed for it is ludicrous...

I could see offering your spare CPU power and getting paid for it... I might even willingly let someone else use my spare cycles if it's on lowest priority and treats me somewhat fairly... But seeing as it's not legal i doubt it's anything i am interested in.

There used to be (maybe still are) a couple of programs over the years from many noble universities and research companies all around the world that would use your CPU for their research when you were allowing it (not needing it). I remember to have partaken in a research for molecular ...something :) I don't recall anyway it was for a good cause and really fun. After a couple of months they finished their research. It's quite amazing to picture the amount of raw processing power that they had at their disposal and what they could do with it.

An example https://boinc.berkeley.edu/

I'm with Tarm on this. Especially given the games you listed. I do have a question, however - did both these games start to slow down AT THE SAME TIME? In other words, were they both running fine and then last Tuesday both started running more slowly?

Or are you saying that with both these games, you'd play them for a time and after a while each slowed down, but it didn't happen concurrently?

True that, it's not without reason that many people buy new AMD graphic cards and make their own clusters for farming. On the other hand I think people would kindly decline my offer if they new I had an almost 7 year old 9600 GTM for offer xD

Depends on how difficult it is to access the hardware. GPU's and graphics cards are just clusters of arithmetic chips, it's curious why the x86 only gives you 1 FPU and 8 slots for working with it, the branching logic is what makes it slow while basic math doesn't need any protection. I mean, you can't hack a computer with pure math operators :P And since most of the graphics involves ludicrous amounts of math, especially for 3D games (and more so with special lighting calculations and physics) it's almost no wonder why they are so useful. Almost wonder if Sony didn't get that stick up their butt, if their CELL processors would have kicked off and done so much better for non-gaming.

Reminds me, one of the worst choices they made, removing the option of having the PS3 as a computer. I would have had some fun trying out and programming the open CELL processors as they were just a kernel device you could send instructions to and get the results afterwards... But that's an unrelated rant...

Would be awesome to hack a PC through math and in the end you gain control over the GPU and can change the user's hue range of colors... that will teach them to mess with a beautiful mind ahhah xD
But back to the real world, a little bit unrelated to the OP, but regarding the raw power of the GPU and what you mentioned about the branching logic -> the new (old) rivalry between DirectX & OpenGL in form of driver overhead reduction and draw calls enhancement. I think it's good competition from which one we'll benefit and in the end the gaming world moved the whole sphere of science a little step forward

Parts wear down, systems get clogged, the computer gets dirty. You just have to figure out how many of these are factoring into it. Remember that higher heat = performance throttles to keep up, and with the fan getting old and dusty it can't keep up over time.

If you don't want to get a new laptop, then you should consider getting a new desktop. All of your problems can be solved pretty cheaply with an AMD APU system. Something like this chip http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819113359 (but you'd probably buy it from http://www.ncix.com/detail/amd-a10-7850k-apu-quad-core-4f-92941.htm , it's just newegg has a shinier description) in a full system would be around $400-$500 depending on what features you'd want + monitor and peripherals.

With Black Friday and Christmas coming up it's worth considering anyway. Maybe even a new lap hey is that a sniper over the