Laptop lags after 15 minutes of DVD viewing
 

Hey all

I have this Dell Inspiron 8600 laptop and after about 15 minutes of gameplay, internet surfing, or watching dvd movies the exhaust fan revs up and the movie or game begins to lag and jerk all over. I'm wondering if anyone knows what could be going on here? I used to have a similar problem with my 32bit desktop but forgot how i solved it or even if I did. The hardware is as follows:

Intel celeron 1.6GHZ
1GB DDR 333 ram
ATI 9600 mobility
Run of the mill DVD-RW drive
80GB 5200 ATA drive

Running dvds on WMP and Interactual with klite codec pack with same results.

Any ideas on how I can make this thing run alittle smoother?

Sound like your cpu is overheating and is throtteling. Check the temperature with something like coretemp, i8Kfangui, speedfan, ...

//edit: even better, Rightmark CPU clock utility, since it has a graph that shows the throtteling.

check your task manager to see what is eating up your CPU cycles, check the processes tab. It's possible an instance of svchost.exe is acting up