I have an inspiron 5150 with a geforce5200 64mb video card, 512mb ram and 3.06 pentium 4.

 

I used to play games on it, like dawn of war and counter-strike all the time, but recently all of my games have started to lag really bad.  Sometimes the computer will actually shut off it gets so bad.  I have updated my bios to A38 and have updated my video driver, even though everything would run fine before.  I'm getting kinda of baffled and wondering if i should just reformat my hard drive or maybe it is a (i hope not...) hardware problem.  I also use a laptop cooler, though Im not sure how much good it really does.  I would like to hear what anyone has to say about my situation.

 

Thanks in advance

 -Shidler