Hi there,

I recently purchased an Alienware M17x with 8 GB RAM, more than enough HDD space - I don't have the exact system specs but it's supposed to be the most powerful gaming laptop. I've just recently got back into PC gaming after years of being a console gamer, and yesterday when I booted up Skyrim, it defaulted to Ultra High graphics, and everything looked amazing and also ran perfectly as well, no hiccups at all. Today, after installing Total War: Shogun 2, the frame rate has dropped massively, not so much that I can't play, but a massive trade off compared to yesterday. I have already checked in NVIDA control panel and made sure the right card is selected, and that doesn't seem to change it. Does anyone know why this would be happening all of a sudden? Would it be because I've installed another game at all, or something I'm completely ignorant of?

Thanks for any help in advance

Defragment your harddrive. Installing more data will mean reduced peformance in any application or game that uses the HDD. Defragging will improve disc drive performance.