Issues revisiting my laptop.

[Zork Nemesis]

So yeah, I upgraded to a new PC, there was a whole thread about that already, but I held on to my laptop. It's a good laptop and there's no need to get rid of it. That's beside the point, i'm travelling this weekend and I figured now would be a good time to look into getting stuff updated while I still have a good network to work with.

The networking itself doesn't appear to be a problem, but since I booted it up (for the first time in about two weeks) it's been running fairly choppy. There were no problems with it the last time I used it, beyond it's outstanding battery issue (in which the battery is basically dead and can't hold a charge). It's not the usual "long load" slow, for some strange reason it almost appears as though Windows Explorer is stuttering. I mouse over something or I try to scroll through a window and it hiccups at least every other second in the process. I've checked the process managers and have found nothing that could be using up CPU or memory at the moment to cause such slowdowns. The machine is done updating, it's been restarted more than once and is still running slow. There are no PC scans going though Windows Defender wants me to run a scan because it hasn't in a while. The only thing really different now than last week is the fact that my external HDD is no longer connected, and I doubt that's an issue (though the machine is running a little low on space).

Does anyone have any ideas as to what might be going on. For reference it's running Windows 7-64 Bit with a core i7 and 8GB memory.

EDIT: Asked a friend about it, he's telling me it's a video driver issue, and is running me through reinstalling the driver, seems to be going well.

EDIT AGAIN: Found the issue: driver incompatibility with Final Fantasy XI. Only gets choppy and slow when FFXI is running (or the PlayOnline viewer).

[cam]

What kind of laptop is it? If its not super old, most laptops come with a hidden partition that you can boot to which will basically reimage your computer and install Windows to be exactly how you had it when you first took it out of the box.

I find that if I've done a couple hours worth of troubleshooting like reinstalling drivers, going back to different restore points, etc it's really not worth my time to dig super hard into this stuff. It will take you less time to backup all your files, boot to the hidden section, reimage, and then update/install apps back to how you want it. Steam has a game backup/restore mechanism so you can back up all your games and reinstall super easily after you're done.

REMEMBER: If you find your computer does have this feature and you choose to use it, this will remove all your files and applications so you do have to backup of all that stuff.