Basically my computer randomly lags everytime I play a game. It doesn't matter what game it is, my FPS randomly drops from some high number to like 3-5 FPS and I get extreme lag, almost disabling if that's a good word. For example, if I play counter strike I will join the game and will have like 60 FPS. By the time I spawn, like 15 seconds later it will drop down to 5 fps for a minute then go back up to 60 for half a minute. How long it stays normal or lags varies but I'm really tired of it and don't know what to do. It only does this in games and doesn't lag in other stuff. I don't have viruses because I have good anti-virus and take care of my system very well with a lot of defrags etc... I've tried lowering my video settings on games and no matter how low I go, even 640 by whatever it will still lag. Please help!

To begin with, your graphics are extremely weak: "ATI Radeon Xpress X1200 is hardly apt for gamers. Only old games like Quake 3 Arena can be played in 1024x768 with high/medium details fluently. Even Warcraft 3 runs fluently with minimum details. Current, demanding games like FEAR, Doom3 and Quake 4 can hardly be played (e.g. 2 frames per second in battle scenes in Quake 4)." http://www.notebookcheck.net/ATI-Ra... "I don't have viruses because I have good anti-virus and take care of my system very well with a lot of defrags etc" And which anti-virus program would that be? Norton or McAfee are not "good", so if that's what you're running, you may wanna consider something else. As for degragging, it's good to do occasionally, but doing it excessively isn't gonna help. What about scanning for spyware/malware? Do you do that regularly? Which program do you use? Do you have a system cleaning program such as CCleaner & do you use it regularly? Have you run MSCONFIG to disable unnecessary programs from loading at startup?

Weak or not, the only reason I'm positing here and concerned in general is because it didn't do this with the games I play before. It just recently started doing this. As for games, I mostly play some half life 1 mods which don't require that much performaces -- a mod that was created nearly 6 years ago. As for anti-virus, I use ESET NOD32. It has been the best anti-virus I have ever used. And I'm aware degragging too much is bad, my system is set to do it once every 2 weeks automatically. And yes, I have CCleaner on my computer and use it a lot.