Sudden drop in FPS for no reason?

[WillNeedsHelpFast]

So I play a multiplayer mod to Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. I've played it for years and I've never had framerate issues before. Suddenly last night that changed. At any point I have under 10 fps and I don't know why. I don't have new settings, any new mods. My game is exactly how it was before when it ran fine.

The only difference is that the .txd texture files got assosciated with a program. I don't know if that would cause performance but it appears Windows 8 is garbage because I can't remove the assosciation and the temp fix for that isn't the greatest. But I don't know if that's what's causing my issue or not.

I've checked my Nvidia control panel, and it's set to use my gfx card. I even changed it to use integrated gfx to see if it made a difference. It didn't.

This is the only game this happens with. All other games run like normal, and this just started randomly. For no reason. Nothing seems to fix it.

Last night however; I temporarily fixed it. I first noticed this problem, uninstalled mods and everything and it didn't work. I then decided since my laptop had been running like all day, maybe I needed to reboot. That didn't work. I was trying to unassosciate a program from a file and that didn't work, but when I tried on that 2nd reboot, it ran with 90 fps no problem. I decide to shut my laptop down and go to bed and deal with it in the morning. I get up today and try, and the issue is back.

My drivers are still up to date and haven't been upgraded in weeks. This issue started last night.

Win8 64
Nvidiga GeForce GT 650M
Intel Core i7 3632QM @ 2.20 GHz
8 gigs ram

[Joshh]

Associating a program with extension won't cause the issue but if you installed new programs maybe they are slowing your laptop down ?.

Close all the other non-necessary programs and then run the game.

[WillNeedsHelpFast]

My computer runs fine. Like I said, no issues with other games and no general performance problems. I didn't install any new programs either. This specific game has just decided to run poorly for no reason, and I can't figure out why.

[WillNeedsHelpFast]

(Sorry for the DP, it wouldn't let me edit a previous post but I find something new)

Alright so remember when I said I restarted a few times the other day and the issue disappeared.

Well, I restarted yesterday and when I came back, it was working again. But I turned off my laptop for the night and went to bed. I wake up this morning, and the problem persists. It seems to resolve itself temporarily when I restart, but when I shut my laptop down for extended period of time it does this.

But only with GTA. Any ideas on why that is and what I could do to fix this?

[WillNeedsHelpFast]

Update: I think this may be relevant but I'm not sure how. I don't usually watch videos on my laptop but I wanted to check something out. Any video on YouTube I play has these effects:

5-6 seconds at the most with horrible framerate, and then the video sets to 00:00 and then it crashes to this screen:



This happens with every video on YouTube, but not on my desktop. My laptop and my desktop are connected to the same router, but the laptop is on WiFi. Despite that, sites load fast and everything else seems fine. Never had this problem before, and it seems quite interesting to be just a coincidence to start the same time my GTA randomly craps out.

I don't understand how exactly they might be relevant, considering ones a YouTube video and the other is an old video game, but I don't even understand why restarting my computer fixes the game. (I'll test later to see if rebooting fixes the YouTube issue like it does with GTA)

It's just weird because I can play counter strike global offensive, no frame issues. Arma 3, no issues. It seems like all other games play fine (as far as I've tested) except GTA and YouTube videos.

[WillNeedsHelpFast]

Oh boy, it just gets worse and worse.

So I noticed when I was testing out the YT videos, I never heard any sound. And I turned my volume up to 80.

I played a bit of Arma and didn't hear any sound. I had headphones leading to my desktop in but the volume was still on 80, I would of heard at least something, at least when I shot a gun or flew a chopper. But I didn't, and the volume icon remains as the speaker with only 1 half-circle (when it would normally be at 3 by now)

It gets better. I load up iTunes to see if I can play a song, I double click on a few different songs and get the same result. The player states that I'm playing the song but remains stuck on 00:00 and I hear nothing. I can "Pause" it or "Skip" on the track, both of which act very laggy and take upwards of 3 or 4 seconds, something that normally was instantly.

In addition: I remembered something. The other day I started up my laptop and immediately opened the task manager to check some things. I noticed that on a fresh reboot, I had 100% disk usage for 5-10 minutes. It then stopped and I haven't checked to see if the same thing happened.

- GTA plays like crap (but no other game)
- YouTube just doesn't play
- iTunes just doesn't play
- One instance of 100% disk usage on boot-up

Is this a hardware issue? Is it possible that part of my HDD is dying? I cant fix this on a laptop can I?

[WillNeedsHelpFast]

Moar updates!

So, I was recommended to do a System File Check, and bad news about that is that it found some errors but it couldn't repair all of them.

http://i.gyazo.com/5789b96d2a205963425e3934a4c41ba5.png

 Now, I don't have Windows 8 on disk, because this laptop I bought was through Amazon and it didn't come with one, and I don't have Win8 laying around, so I can't try again with Win8 disk in the drive, which is problematic.

I've got a restore point as far back as July 9th, it'll be minimum data-loss and I got backups. Is that my only other solution?

If so, should I go ahead and update to 8.1 to avoid future problems? I've been holding off on 8.1 to avoid data loss and to avoid potential bugs that tend to be in newer releases.

(I think this problem is more Windows 8 than it is games specifically)

[WillNeedsHelpFast]

New update:

So the SFC had issued that problem. Well I did a DISM and when it finished, it said it had cleared problems. I did another SFC to check and that didn't show anymore violations.

For 2 days, it appeared to be working properly (sound was back, youtube played, fps didn't take a dive in GTA), but it's done that before, it's kinda sparratic.

The issue has been persistent on happening for the past 3-4 days, rebooting has not made a difference. I did another SFC scan and nothing came up. Any ideas what to do?