Dropped laptop, now FPS low in all games. (formerly Sudden FPS drop)

[Snowstorm]

This morning, preparing for a long car ride, I asked my brother to give me my backpack with my laptop in it.  Naturally, he dropped it.  The laptop looked fine(No immediate signs of damage), but later, while in the car, I tried to start up KSP in version 1.1.1, and I was getting extreme FPS lag, and even when I put my graphics settings to lowest, I still lagged a bit.  I later tried to play other steam games, and they had the same problem.  Here's a bunch of stats that computer nerds will make sense of as my specs:     i5-4210U/2.7GHz/Intel HD-4400, 8GB/1TB.  I have never had this problem before.  Does anyone have any advice?

[Gaarst]

Find some monitoring software to see if everything works correctly (don't have an example off the top of my head but they are easy to find); and react appropriately.

If something is wrong then think about repairing your laptop (make your brother pay for the repair ), if everything is normal, then you'd have to find the cause of the lag.

Assuming you have Windows on your laptop, posting your dxdiag (Win+R, type "dxdiag" and press enter, then "Save all information") might help (not really sure how to extract useful information out of a dxdiag text file though, so someone else will have to help you).

Edited May 2, 2016 by Gaarst

[sal_vager]

Wow your title was really bad, and could make people browsing the forums believe there are sudden FPS drops in KSP.

It sounds like your laptop is now broken, I am not even going to attempt to guess what is wrong if it is under warranty.

You should contact the vendor and arrange for a repair.

[smjjames]

If it's all games, sounds like it's a problem with the laptop itself. Something could have gotten knocked loose, who knows.

[swjr-swis]

13 hours ago, Snowstorm said:

Dropped laptop, now FPS low in all games.

Definitely a gravity problem. I would suspect the G-force, but your Intel doesn't agree with it.

 

4 hours ago, sal_vager said:

Wow your title was really bad, and could make people browsing the forums believe there are sudden FPS drops in KSP.

I'm glad you corrected that: I've been wondering what I needed to do to lower the FPS and cool my laptop down.

[Snowstorm]

4 hours ago, smjjames said:

If it's all games, sounds like it's a problem with the laptop itself. Something could have gotten knocked loose, who knows.

I think so too, but of course my brother vehemently disagrees with me.

[smjjames]

Just now, Snowstorm said:

I think so too, but of course my brother vehemently disagrees with me.

That's something between you and your brother though.

[Snowstorm]

1 minute ago, smjjames said:

That's something between you and your brother though.

It is.  I've noticed that the core usage jumps up to 100% if I open a game at all, and goes down to 8 or 9% if I put it into the background.

[Kilmeister]

This is actually not that an uncommon thing on laptops.  Most likely the heat sink has been slightly jarred.  If you are comfortable with it, open up the laptop and tighten the screws on the heatsink.   What happens is that even if there is a tiny gap opened between the CPU and the heat sink it won't be able to properly dissipate the heat so modern CPUs throttle themselves down, hence the 100% usage.

If not, take it to a geek squad or something and ask them to try either tightening up the screws on the heat sink or reseating it.

[smjjames]

52 minutes ago, Kilmeister said:

This is actually not that an uncommon thing on laptops.  Most likely the heat sink has been slightly jarred.  If you are comfortable with it, open up the laptop and tighten the screws on the heatsink.   What happens is that even if there is a tiny gap opened between the CPU and the heat sink it won't be able to properly dissipate the heat so modern CPUs throttle themselves down, hence the 100% usage.

If not, take it to a geek squad or something and ask them to try either tightening up the screws on the heat sink or reseating it.

Not if it's under warranty because opening it will void the warranty.

[stk2008]

If this started after you dropped it my bet would be you killed the CPU fan or dislodged the cpu heatsink and now the CPU is over heating causing it to throttle down below max speeds

[Waxing_Kibbous]

Is the OS still showing 8GB RAM? Maybe a RAM card got knocked loose. That is a good easy place to check first. (I say this because integrated gfx chips use the RAM).

[Snowstorm]

Good news!  I fixed the problem.  I looked at the charger port, and it turned out the charger prong had bent when the laptop was dropped, causing it to not charge.  This put it into low power mode and destroyed my performance.  I unbent it, and now it's working fine.  Thanks for the support!

Edited May 5, 2016 by Snowstorm