Epic lag- and now a turquoise screen

[Keria]

Every 30 seconds or so my laptop will seize up and lag horribly for around 15 secs before returning to normal. It affects all programs but is most noticeable on ffxi- it brings the game down to 3 fps making the game close to unplayable. This problem started when I came home for xmas, my dad suggested it was due to overheating but I'm using the same setup I was before including a usb cooling fan. Any ideas? I have done a full virus scan, disk cleanup and defrag recently. Also tried closing vent and firefox when I play but this not only doesn't help, it has the side effect of making me bored as fuck. I'm not using wireless either so it's not due to that. It usually starts around an hour after I turn my PC on.

[Cephius]

Only thing I can suggest would be to keep the task manager open, when your computer locks up look at the list and see what program is taking up all your memory and CPU usage. Hopefully this will narrow down what's causing the problem.

[Keria]

Here's the thing, I've done that and the only program taking up any significant amount of memory is pol.exe.

Just switched to wow where the same problem occurred, this time however fps gradually dropped to 7 (from 50) over about an hour, and then when I tried to alt-tab, I got a black screen, a loud scary beep, then wow crashed Q_____Q I'm so frightened, the computer demon sounds pissed at me~

[Zigma]

i don't know if this qualifies as "advice" but i had a problem like this with a laptop and I had to format the whole thing to fix it.
Maybe you can do the same?

[Kaisha]

Download ProcessExplorer and use it instead to see if anything pops up.
(Taskmanager sucks for troubleshooting)

[Keria]

My screen keeps flickering a blue-green colour for a second and just now when I was looking at a website the tables and address bar were filled turquoise for a second, then it all kinda blurred sideways and disappeared. What the shit.

[Killgannon]

hate to say it but it could be your graphics card dying... this is REALLY BAD NEWS in a laptop...

you can try reformat, but if it reoccurs, you're prolly fuct =/

[Keria]

Well I just spent the big money on a cooling fan apparently more powerful than the piece of shit that came with my PC. So if I still get lag after a few hours tonight I'm gonna send the laptop back for the manufacturers to look at. (still under full warranty :D) I haven't had any crazy artifacting apart from the turquoiseness yesterday so we'll see how this goes. I really, really hope this is just overheating :(

[levish]

if you get any sort of artifacting I would send it back for repair without delay