Serious FPS Problem

First and foremost, hi everyone (this is my first post, after all)

I have a certain problem with my laptop. Basically, whenever I start my game up, it starts off fine, going between 20-30 FPS. Then it drops a couple, to around 10-15. Which is fine by me, since my desktop's busted, I'm just happy to play the game. And I didn't buy this laptop for gaming anyway.

But recently... my laptop has been dropping the FPS rate to 1-4... which makes the game un-playable. It never did this before. I hadn't made any major changes. I've tried everything, running the game in XP compatibility (I have Vista), updating my laptop through HP Update (there were a few outdated drivers, but none of them seemed to have anything to do with the video card), scanning for trojans, etc. I even went into BIOS and changed the VRAM settings to 128... and it still didn't help.

Now, the laptop itself isn't old. I got it in late July last year, making it just under a year old. I haven't overclocked or anything either, and I don't see any other changes anywhere in performance (the only other game I play on works fine, but it's not too taxing).

Does anyone know what's wrong with my system? I haven't tried re-downloading the game, but I don't think that'll help? Here are my laptop's specs, if it helps any:

Model: HP Pavilion dv2700
CPU: AMD Turion 64 X2 TL-60 (duo-core), 2.00 GHz
RAM: 4GB
VRAM: NVIDIA MCP67M (GeForce 7150M/nForce 630M), 1851MB Approx. memory, says dxdiag

Any help is appreciated

this is usually caused by overheating, and the drop in FPS is caused by your computer throttling itself to avoid burning up.

try something like this: elevate the back of your laptop with a book or some other object, and see if the problem persists, or take longer to manifest itself.

Thanks, it's actually staying consistently 'moderate' now. I tinkered with the power settings, to make sure it won't burn up as fast, and elevated it as you said.

I feel silly now. Such an easy fix xD