the_atm: 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?
Just as a 'just checking' sort of thing, have you rebooted the laptop, as in not just hibernating sort of powering down, but and actual click on restart? It's a long shot, but it's real easy with laptops now to not realize you haven't rebooted in months.
It's probably unrelated, but the game Blazblue has a well documented issue that is a lot like this where the game runs 60fps on a system, then randomly drops to 30fps until the system is properly rebooted. Nobody knows why, and it's extra annoying on a laptop where reboots and shutdowns aren't necessarily part of the normal use cycle.