Windows 7 Lags when I play ANY game.

Okay. I haven't played too many games on this computer yet, but the ones I have played play smooth for a few minutes then start lagging really hard. Before anyone says its a graphic card performance issue, both of the games that I've played were run on lower end computers than this on low settings and were perfectly smooth. I have the games on low but the lag still happens.
Here are my specs.

Windows 7 Home Premium 64bit SP1
AMD Athlon II x2 215 dual core
4gb RAM
640 GB HDD
NVIDIA GeForce 9200

The games I tried are the only few I own, Portal and World of Warcraft, both on lowest settings. The game would start lagging, while simultaneously lagging my whole computer until the game was closed. I've updated all my graphic drivers, got any other updates that I could, and ran a virus scan with clean results. Can anyone help?

Have you checked system resources when playing one of the games, look at your performance and see what processors are using memory/cpu at the time? WoW certainly isn't the most demanding game out there, and you shouldn't have any problems playing it ( ignoring internet connection). Because you are experiencing problems in a local game as well can you make sure Direct X is up to date?

Because i am more experienced with WoW (2000 hours + ) well start with that. What kind of FPS do you get in the game from when its smooth to when it starts to lag also (just curious) when you start to lag what is your latency?

Mainly i would just check services and programs running in the background to make sure they are not hogging your system.

Did you try downloading and installing the latest Directx?:)

I'd add check those background programs..... Run - msconfig.exe and use the Startup Tab to disable these.

You can try optimizing your machine with this....

360Amigo System Speedup Free - Free software downloads and software reviews - CNET Download.com

Some people use it some don't,I for one love it...

DirectX is completely updated already, and it didn't solve the problem .
When I get home from work I'll check those background processes.

I don't mean to nag or double post, but could anyone else offer any advice? I'd like to get this fixed ASAP

I didn't think it would matter because they are both newer games and still supported by the companies that make them and were therefore updated to work on Windows 7 (Atleast that was my though)

Quinnfap said:

DirectX is completely updated already, and it didn't solve the problem .
When I get home from work I'll check those background processes.

What do you mean by this? Did you update DX or do you mean Windows 7 already has DX11?

Also you might look through here for some tips - Tips on Troubleshooting Game Issues