Perforamnce help

[wintass12]

Hello, I own an Alienware M14xR2 that recently i've been having performance problems with. It has a gt 650m with a core i7-3630QM. I bought this back in late 2012 or early 2013 and this thing is pretty beat up, like really beat up. they have had some impact on performance but not to the level that i am expirencing  now. I 've had a several problem in the past where i have had tempratures reach 90 degrees but thats all fixed now. The problem is im getting HORRIBLE performance while my temp is very good Last week the performance was fine. And didn't install anything since then. I would gladly apprecite it if i could get some help if you need any more information about this system email me and ill respond as soon as i possibly can, thanks in advance.

[patio]

5 years old...a backup / wipe and a clean install is overdue...

[Lisa_maree]

With a Laptop which is beat up i would be testing the hard drive. Seems your model shipped with a Toshiba 750gb which by now could be end of life. You could run a few programs to test the drive health.

Hard drive benchmark   http://www.benchbench.com/         normal for your drive would be access speed 12ms I/Ops something around 100 and about 90 mbps + for data transfer. The graph on the website is for a similar drive to yours. I think you will find the data transfer will be all over the range from as low as 20 to 180, if so then this would be one reason for the computer running slow.

Hard drive health http://crystalmark.info/en/download/
This will confirm if the drive is failing.
If the drive is slow consider getting a 250GB SSD drive they are getting really cheap. You could either transfer the old drive or if the programs and data are not needed do a clean install.