So I've had this laptop for about 2 - 2.5 years now and when I first bought it I was able to run Battlefield 3 and some other games on around High - Ultra High graphics settings with about a reasonable 50-60 fps. I have an i7 2.00GHz processor, 4 GB of ram and a graphics card; nvidia GTX 560M. Now for some reason I get about 30 fps and no higher than 40 on Battlefield 3 even when I play on the lowest settings possible even with the resolution down to 1650x1050 (the original was 1920x1080). I've tried cleaning the fans as much as I could, and have re-formatted my drive a couple of times to get rid of excess files/programs that might have been clogging the system up. All of the latest drivers are installed too but I really have no idea what might have happened. I was thinking that it may be because the GPU might be worn out due to excessive use over the past 2 years or so but I really need some ideas here. Even if I can't find a solution for this I really wish to know why this has happened so I could possible prevent it in the future if I can. Anything helps at this point! :)

Do you have other programs you have picked up along the way that may be running resident when you turn on your laptop? Did you reinstall the games after you installed the new drivers etc? Have you rated your computer? Are there any yellow flags in device manager ?

The answers are yes, no, no and no. When I first emptied out my hard drive, I deleted windows too and then re-installed windows on to the empty one so there isn't a possibility of having viruses or other resident programs. I only emptied my C drive (where windows was installed) and I just moved the games I wanted to keep to my D drive so no, I didn't have to re-install the games and didn't do so anyway.

You might try reinstalling the games after you backed up and critical files that go with them. Also you need to make sure you rate windows as that can sometimes affect performance.