WEIRD issue: Stuttering + Internet dies. Please help!

[MarianoRyu]

I've been trying to figure this out for months, and I'm at wits' end, so I decided to try my luck by asking here. It's a tremendously strange problem I have with certain games that I think my computer should be more than able to handle. Examples of this are World of Warcraft, Call of Duty 1 and United Offensive (Call of Duty 2 works fine), and the first series of Half-Life games (before Half-Life 2, which works fine.).

You see, while trying to play these games (no matter how high their graphics settings are), my computer starts stuttering (thus making the games unplayable), the Internet connection shuts down, and I need a manual restart to fix these issues. I've run full anti.virus checks (using NOD32), Registry cleanups with CCleaner, even tried to upgrade to Windows 7 and reformatted back to Vista, all to no avail.

The weirdest thing of all is that the Half-Life games do that when using DirectX display mode (Software mode and OpenGL work fine).

I'm on a Dell Inspiron 1525 laptop, and my specs are as follows:

OS: Windows Vista Home Edition 32-bit SP 2.
Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo T5550 1.83 Ghz
Graphics Card: Mobile Intel(R) 965 Express Chipset Family (Integrated)
DirectX version: 10.0
Disk Space: 118 GB, about 35 GB actually used.

What could I do to solve this?

Thank you very much in advance.

[Wyrm]

Sounds like your processor could be over-loading, but that doesnt explain the internet connection. Does it give you any error messages or anything?

Sometimes even if your specs are up to par, your pc cant make use of all the avaliable resources it has.

[MarianoRyu]

Sounds like your processor could be over-loading, but that doesnt explain the internet connection. Does it give you any error messages or anything?

Sometimes even if your specs are up to par, your pc cant make use of all the avaliable resources it has.

Not at all. My Wi-Fi catcher dies and fails to detect any connections - even though they're actually running. Moreover, even after shutting the program down, the issue persists.

It even happens when trying to run something as insignificant as Duke Nukem 3 Atomic Edition. Yet more complex programs (Lord of the Rings: Battle For The Middle Earth II, to put an example, and emulators like MAME or Project 64) have no issue.

[Wyrm]

Not at all. My Wi-Fi catcher dies and fails to detect any connections - even though they're actually running. Moreover, even after shutting the program down, the issue persists.

It even happens when trying to run something as insignificant as Duke Nukem 3 Atomic Edition. Yet more complex programs (Lord of the Rings: Battle For The Middle Earth II, to put an example, and emulators like MAME or Project 64) have no issue.

This is strange. I honestly have no idea Sorry i couldnt help.

[MarianoRyu]

I swear it's getting on my nerves, I don't know what else to do!