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I'm using a 5 years old ASUS K53SV with Win 7 using a Nvidia GT540M GPU.
Recently, especially when playing games, everything runs smoothly, but after a while, usually a few minutes, there's a half second freeze, and then the performances get terrible, usually less than 20 FPS on medium settings. And everytime I launch a game after, the performances will be outright awful.
Lowering the graphical settings doesn't change anything, the only solution is to restart the computer every time.
My drivers are up to date, I selected the Nvidia card as the default GPU and not the integrated Intel chip, temperatures are OK.
You could try reverting to Nvidia drivers from about six months ago. I have a similar problem, but with HTML5 YouTube videos (try watching a few EEVBlog ones) - the display driver crashes in Win7, claiming a hardware error in the GTX 660 Ti card, but on the same computer (dual boot) it does not crash in Win10 with the same version of the driver. A recent Win7 update regarding the DirectX drivers made it not so bad, but did not remove the problem. – Andrew Morton – 2016-05-20T19:11:23.620