[SOLVED] Advice/help request

[Nanviik]

Hello, a relatively old gaming laptop of mine (About 3 years or so) is running significantly slow, being unable to run bare bones games and the like so I'd like to ask for advice on what to do about this. I'm not the most pc-savvy person but have a general understanding of things
History;
Brought about 3 or so years ago, a dell inspiron 15 - 5576. Worked more than perfectly well for what I wanted at the time. Eventually a charger was lost and I brought a universal laptop adaptor, believe set the voltages right on it, at that point the laptop still worked but after a fair while it started slowly having issues, to the point it wouldn't boot. I diagnosed this myself and it was a RAM card failure, I left it be for about a year or more due to other things going on, I got around to replacing the RAM and again lost charger (Yeah I know haha) at this point I brought one built for the inspiron 5576 model from online, the laptop worked however as of now it's got a few issues going on.
The pc can do general browsing but most of the time the fans are on and the laptop heats up a fair amount, however when running any game it crawls to an absolute snails pace. I've tried updating drivers; All but the BIOS seem to want to update, the contrast between now and how it used to be is what gets me, or is this just to be expected? Whether it's the power supply, RAM card or just faulty things
Thanks for the help, I'll include what info I can if there's any more willing to try to provide
Processor: AMD FX-9830P Radeon R7
Graphics: AMD Radeon R7 & Radeon RX560

When using open hardware monitor if I open a game the CPU use seems to spike to close to 100%, and on openhardware monitor won't let me monitor my gpu's, memory seems to be okay
Windows also acts funny for me, unable to change display brightness and when updating it goes into a boot loop at which point the update uninstalls. Advice? Thank you very much

 

[Lutfij]

Welcome to the forums, newcomer!

Pretty much every laptop since the last decade will not allow you to update your BIOS or even flash it if your laptop is lacking one of the two, the battery(or it doesn't have enough charge on it) or the adapter(or if it's the wrong unit for your laptop) or both.

You might want to disassemble the laptop and see if it's pending a maintenance since laptops that are taxed will mechanically introduce dust and debris into the vents.

I hope you're not using a third party app to make sure your drivers are up to date...? If you are, please stop. Manually install your drivers after cross referencing what the latest version is across Dell's support site and AMD's support site.

 

[RedJak]

From an electrical standpoint as long as your Volts, Amps, and Watts are identical to the lost charger you should be okay. I say should because there could be differences in the circuits if it's a "smart" charger etc. etc. I would not think this would cause your games to run slower. As Lutfij pointed out the heat could mean needing a cleaning and drivers do make a difference.

I had a similar slowdown and introduced a faster hard drive and additional Ram to my last laptop. I always have a browser running which really eats up ram regardless of how many tabs and even trying to suspend and keep only a few essential addons. Experiment with what you have open while running games and see what processes are using the most RAM and CPU. It could also be the operating itself.