BleepingComputer.com: really strange performance problem

so i bought a pretty low end hp laptop about 7 months ago. It has vista home premium, 2 gigs of memory, a dual core amd athlon processor, and integrated nvidia graphics processor. I don't play many games that often but occasionally i will play an old game that should be able to run perfectly fine on this computer. the laptop has worked fine until about a month ago. now when i load up a game such as dawn of war it will work fine at first, but if I then minimize the window then maximize it, it will then run terrible slow and the frame rate will not go back to normal even after a long time. I have tested this problem on several different games and have gotten similar results. I do maintain my laptop. I run disk defragmenter, diskcheck, I have avg anti virus + ad aware anti-spyware, I have plenty of disk space and keep windows updated. I am pretty sure this is not a problem with viruses since I have run many scans and am consistently clean. I don't know if this is a vista problem or what but it is really annoying. any help would be appreciated.

This might not be a Vista problem. I have several games that say, in the ReadMe, not to minimize and maximize as it could cause performance or stability issues. You could try running the games in a Windows XP compatibility mode.

I am not sure if it is a problem with vista but I am pretty sure it is not a problem with the games themselves. this did not happen a month ago. Also different games like call of duty act differently. Call of duty will run fine for about 15 seconds then it will slow down alot if i then minimize it then maximize it, it runs fine for about another 15 seconds before slowing down again. I tried running it in xp compatibility but it did not seem to do anything

I have the same problem with my system - and I've got 8 gB of RAM (so it's likely not a RAM issue).
I suspect that it's an issue with games that are designed to run in full screen mode - and that haven't been optimized for windowing/task switching.

My "cure" is to shut the game down and restart it - and to avoid minimizing the game if at all possible.

anyone ????

I know that the problem has nothing to do with the games themselves because it didn't used to run slow before. Also the performance doesn't slow down only if I minimize the screen. different games behave differently. I know that something has to be wrong. even games with really bad graphics like dungeon runners runs at about 10 fps with only graphics settings turned off!!??

Have you tried new graphics drivers? Games have to load and reload textures and maps when minimized and maximized. Most need to work with the drivers in order to do it without issues. Some integrated graphics solutions don't have the necessary power and memory for larger data. Assuming you don't minimize, how is the performance?

This happens on a lot of games, they are not meant to exit full screen mode and go through a resolution change etc.
A lot of games need direct access to the GPU and disrupting that can cause issues.

Particular to the games themselves.