I have a low-end HP Office laptop with an Intel i3-1115G4 processor and Intel UHD graphics. I know it's not designed for gaming, but I used to play Valorant at around 60 FPS and Elden Ring at about 40 FPS on high settings with no stuttering at 1024x768 resolution. For some reason, my laptop has started to slow down unexpectedly. I'm experiencing 3-5 second screen freezes during Valorant matches, and even the loading screen for competitive matches gets stuck. I suspected it might just be a Valorant issue, but when I tried playing Elden Ring, the performance was noticeably worse as well. I'm a student and I love gaming, but this situation is really frustrating. Also, just to clarify, my drivers are up to date. Could anyone suggest some remedies?
3 Answers
If you're experiencing sudden slowdowns, the first thing to check is the health of your hard drive or SSD. If you're running any updates in the background, that can also slow performance down. Make sure there’s nothing else hogging resources.
You might want to monitor the temperatures using Open Hardware Monitor. If your laptop is older, the thermal paste might be dried up, causing overheating and throttling.
Try downloading HD Tune from their website and run a benchmark on your disk. If you notice any dropouts while reading, it could indicate you need to replace your HDD with an SSD. HDDs typically operate at 5400 RPM and can be quite slow, whereas SSDs can be over 10 times faster.
Just to clarify, I already have an SSD, so it shouldn't be an HDD issue.
I think my laptop is still fairly new, maybe a year or two old, so I hope that's not the issue!