Games started running laggy/ low FPS/ stuttering on my new pc, ran fine a couple days ago

ISOFM

Reputable
Nov 8, 2014
15
0
4,510
I recently got a new (for me) laptop from a guy off of Craigslist, and I already had all of my games and Steam on an external hard drive. The PC handled the games great, Counter strike GO was fast, Fallout 3 was fast, Goat Simulator was fast, all on the highest settings. Chivalry Medieval Warfare was pretty fast at full specs.

Anyway, a couple days ago, I noticed a stutter in-game when I was playing The Witcher: Enhanced Edition, but i didn't think anything of it, because other games ran fine. Then today I load up Counter strike GO, and it's pretty low FPS and more laggy compared to previous performance. Fallout 3 is WAY lower than it had been in the past, and Goat Simulator is the same way.

Microsoft security essentials says I'm virus free, I don't see anything weird in task manager (that I can identify).

I don't know if there is a virus or what, but hopefully someone can try and help me out.

Specs:

Intel i7-3630QM CPU @2.4ghz
8GB RAM
Nvidia Geforce 610M 2GB
64bit Windows 7

Any other information you need to help, please let me know.

Edit: Microsoft Security Essentials just notified me that there was a file called "hacktool/win32" or something like that. When I looked it up, it looked to be a file that gets around being a pirated version of Windows.

So that happened.

If I purchased Windows and installed it, could that fix some issues?
 
Solution
Download an antispyware program and run it, Malwarebytes is a good one so is spybot search and destroy. Spyware is a common cause of reducing performance.