I bought a dell Inspiron 9100 last month. Whenever I got it, I installed a few games on it, and they all ran fine. Recently I've noticed a sharp loss in performance. This loss occured literally overnight. The loss that stands out the most is in painkiller. I used to get FPS upwards of 100, now I get around 45 and sometimes the game drops all the way to 1 and the only way to fix it is to restart the game, where the poor 45-50 FPS performance continues. This behavior is also evident in Aquamark 3, where my benchmark score was literally cut in half.

I have reinstalled direct x 9, reinstalled my graphics drivers and windows.

I have a Radeon Mobility 9700 128mb.