BleepingComputer.com: Is it just overheating, or could it be something else?

Well, my computer was bought in February and received some heavy use since then.

I have noticed recently that the computer has been running fairly hot, and my gaming experiences were chock-full of lovely drops in framerate. I then moved my laptop to the coldest room in the house, and temporary fix, here I come.

But I realize, even though not nearly as hot as it used to be, the framerate during gaming still randomly drops, generally at more stressfull times, but it does drop frequently. The problem is that it never did this before, while playing the same games as I used to.

Although both my hard drives are at least 75% full, in total I have over 100gb of hard drive space left. I defragmented the both of them to get under 1% fragmentation in each (although my backup drive is almost 100% fragmented, what a mystery :/)

I dont have THAT many processes open and I have run Malwarebytes and Spybot S&D, and cleaned up.

I was wondering if perhaps there could be another issue aside overheating here. Perhaps it's not just the fault of the fan being dirty? Any suggestions?

Get some canned air & blow it through the unit.
It would also help if you got a USB power "chill pad" to put iy on.