Gaming problems

Okay, first of all, I know my graphics card sucks, it's a Geforce 2 MX, and while it does suck, this hasn't been happening until lately so I know it's not the card's fault.

Anyways, whenever I am playing a game, every few minutes or so the game will slow to a crawl, like literally a frame every 5 seconds or so. Then after maybe 15 seconds it'll go back to normal. I also think, but am not sure, that the time between these freezes gets shorter the longer I stay on, i'm not sure though. I don't know if it happens on all my games, but I know for sure it happes on Everquest and Warcraft 3, it's really aggrivating because everyone thinks I am lagging, but it's not a connection problem, as I have Cable.

Anyone have some ideas?

Update: This also occours on my Emulators, and some crappy game I downloaded, but not a game by brother downloaded called Crimsonland. Oh, and not long ago my brothre had asked about this problem somewhere else, and he got the reply that the video card was probably overheating, but that would seem weird as it's worked for years on these same games and never done this before.
<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by EQPLayer on 06/09/03 05:22 PM.</EM></FONT></P>

Well, I ran CheckDisk, it said that the Volume was clean. I ran the Free Scan at McAfee(sp?), and it found 4 of the same virus in the Windows file, but when I went to delete them they weren't there, even with the show hidden files option on. And defreagging my harddrive? That's not an option, because I left it on overnight one time, woke up and it was at 2% completion, so going non stop it would take like 25 days to finish.

My Setup: POS Compaq 5330US
P4 1.7 Ghz
512MB SDRam
Geforce2 MX
Creative Soundblaster PCI512

What does VoptXP do?

My Setup: POS Compaq 5330US
P4 1.7 Ghz
512MB SDRam
Geforce2 MX
Creative Soundblaster PCI512

Well, it's fixed, and no, it wasn't the defragger that did it. No, it was something much more....simple. You see when you take a can of compressed air, and blow it into the heatsink fan on your CPU, and enormous think clouds of dust and dust bunnies come out, well, you figure all that dust in there couldn't have been helping things. And it wasn't, because now my problem is fixed. 8)

My Setup: POS Compaq 5330US
P4 1.7 Ghz
512MB SDRam
Geforce2 MX
Creative Soundblaster PCI512