Can't game at all; Can't even watch youtube?!

[agc28]

Dell Laptop
1G RAM
Intel Pentium M 1.60GHz
Video RAM 64M
Video Card ATI Mobility Radeon 9000
WinXP


I believe this is a memory problem, or possibly a video memory problem. System resource is always wasted and cannot be efficiently used.

The problem is that whenever I run any sort of games (with any sort of graphical movement), it starts off running very smoothly, then after about 5-10 minutes of playing, my computer will come to a slow crawl. Everything that I do on the computer becomes slow, including clicking on the start menu (it'll take 10 seconds for the menu to actually appear). This crawl will last for about 20 minutes and disappears after awhile. During the crawl, CPU usage is at or near 100% and I can't really identify where the usage is going to because the chart makes no sense.

I know this computer is not fit for running large-scale resource-demanding games, but the same thing applies to all those flash games on the internet, and even Youtube!

This was not the case when I just bought the computer. It used to run certain large-scale games smoothly at all times (Civilization IV, Dungeon Siege II, etc). My friend mentioned that it might be a problem with driver conflict.

I have so far tried a lot of things, such as updating drivers, rolling back directx and reinstalling it, reinstalling drivers, reinstalling OS, setting the quality of games to low, but nothing seems to be working. This computer is quite new and it makes no sense that it can't even view Youtube without periodic 'downtime.'

Please help and thanks in advance.

[l337_GuY]

Sounds like overheating to me. Is your laptop hot to touch at all?