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Give it a good cleaning and make sure it is in a well ventilated area.most of the time, FPS Drops on a decent machine is due to overheating. have you opened your computer recently? is it full of dust? or do you have a blanket on top of it for some odd reason; whatever it may be, move your desktop or laptop to a more open area without anything obstructing the vents. also, if it has accumulated a lot of dust, use a can of compressed air to remove it. dust not only acts like a blanket, but it also conducts electricity if enough of it piles on.
change your start up programsusually, after some time, people can install loads of stuff, and eventually end up with a lot of background programs like this
eventually, having so many programs start up with your computer and run in the background not only decreases boot time, but also hinders performance because of the amount of resources it takes to run everything.
what you need to do for this is to press and hold the windows key and press the letter R at the same time. this will open your "run" console. (or you can search for it in the start menu)
once the "run" window opens, type in "msconfig" and hit enter. a new window will open up where you can edit a few system settings. go to the "general" tab, click "selective startup" and check "load system services" only. this option is so that the next time you restart your computer, only windows will load and not all the stuff you installed.
(or if you want, you can head over to the 'startup' tab after you've implemented the options stated above and select the services you need the most to start when your turn on your computer.)
Update Driverssometimes with ancient computers, new updates bring compatability with legacy hardware (most of the time).
for this, all you have to do is update everything you can think of like DirectX, XMA, .NET,
GPU/Graphics Drivers, Motherboard/BIOS; anything you can think of that will help your system acheive even greater performance