Help! Laptop Graphics problems

[jayb59874]

Hi there, I am having serious issues with my laptop. About a year ago I purchased a dell inspiron 9100. The specs are quite high for a laptop, pentium 4 3.2GHz with ht processor. It had 512 ram which I upgraded to 2 gigs while visiting the US last year(I am from the UK and memory is cheaper in the US). Most important to me was the radeon 9800 graphics card with 256Mb.

Now originally my machine used to smoke the games that I used to play, however now I have started playing WoW.
The game will run fine for the first 1 or so but after that the framerate starts dropping so fast that after maybe 2 hours the game becomes completely unplayable. I think that this has to be a heat issue since if I restart the machine the framerate is still terrible but if I turn it off for a good 20 minutes to cool down then the problem is lessened but once the machine heats up the graphics go down again.

What I am wondering is if there is any way whatsoever I can do something to rectify this problem. Take the machine apart and try cleaning it? Copy all my info over and reformat my hard drive and start from scratch? Any ideas whatsoever would be appreciated as this is really annoying beyond words, thanks in advance for any help you can give

 

[jayb59874]

When I say I can not thank you enough it really does not even come close. My machine wsa flaking so badly I was already getting around to selling it on ebay and ordering new parts however now it is running like a dream. Thanks again!!!

 

[jayb59874]

Aye, the fans were relatively clean but wedged between the fans and the heatsink was a chunk of solidified dust about 7mm deep that was obviously preventing cooling of any type whatsoever. My only problem is whether or not to bother ordering a new machine, after 3 weeks of researching I ordered the first load of parts, scythe ninja, zalman gpu cooler etc so already 100 pounds into it. Might just sell them on ebay, take the hit and stick with my laptop then wait a little longer and make a larger upgrade with AM2/Conroe...

 

[jayb59874]

Only ordered a couple of days ago so maybe I will send it back. I would really like to get a new machine but to be honest it is really wasteful if the games I like to play (Civ4, EQ, WoW) are all running fine and I have plenty of space etc on my hard drive.