haven't played for over a year and when I went back to start a new game, I find SO much lag and drag that it's simply unplayable. I've verified/repaired, reinstalled, turned off the overlay and disabled nvidia, but nothing seems to work when it did a year ago. please help!

Is this GOTY edition?

yes

driver is 398.35/ GEFORCE GTX 960M. I think thats right? (not very literate when it comes to navigating hardware/cards etc). no, i don't have this problem with any other game

960m it is a entry level vga for laptop, maybe lower the in-game details, I have a 980m and I had to put on High, on Ultra will be a lag.

Presumably it was fine last year with the same hardware that's in use now.

Has anything chnaged re: hardware at all?

yes and no

OK so the reason I asked is that maybe any change could have a big influence. Can you be more specific when you say that yes hardware chnaged but no it didn't change?

sorry for the confusion there- yes, it's the same hardware used previously, no, nothing has changed hardware wise

he used same laptop before and no lag. same with me, i sometimes suddenly get insane lag and when i quit i see witcher3.exe always 100% cpu usage. it's doing something in the background. haven't had this problem before 1.32, i KNOW the patch is the culprit.

'she' used the same laptop...

Maybe Windows get some updates that make W3 to run bad, I had to uninstall all the patches from last 2 months(and block the update service) to have a stable windows, maybe it is something hardware, try to test another game, or 3dmark, see the health of storage(scan for bads if you have hdd).

If it was a global windows problem, we'd see a lot more people affectd by it. I doubt very much it's from windows.