Recently I noticed that a lot of games lag on my laptop. That is, games that used to run perfectly before. Take morrowind for example. This happens all the time:
http://imgur.com/kY48ZWg
Notice how it freezes for a split second as I approach the dude, just before he greets me. The same thing happens with all other characters I approach. Apart from that it also 'freezes' for a split second of varying length randomly during gameplay.
It's not just Morrowind either. Games that are far less resource, uhm, intensive, does it as well, such as Terraria and Anno 1503. It's kinda hella annoying and makes the game pretty unplayable, since fights especially seem to lag quite a bit. Also, even online videos (eg youtube) lag from time to time.

Could it be that my gpus took some heat damage or something? I first noticed the problem after I finished STALKER:CLEAR SKY, which is about the most graphically intense game my laptop can run at decent graphics, and it did run pretty hot during my playthrough (fun game by the way, but poor compared to the original I thought). I've already tried reinstalling the graphics card drivers, and have thoroughly cleaned the inside of the laptop, but to no avail.
The thing that confuses me is that I experience the problem with both of my laptop gpus, Intel (R) Graphics & AMD Radeon HD 6630M, which has me hoping that the problem isn't with the gpus.

Any ideas/suggestions? Should I start stealing, uhm, I mean saving for a new laptop?

It's a Sony Vaio laptop by the way, close to its third birthday.

May be something is using extra cpu or ram.
Try to disable some of startup service and launch game.

Have you installed new drivers or new cpu-hungry programs, like anti-virus, defragmenters or optimizers. Are you doing anything on the background - like downloading a big file from the net, or copying files of usb. if your phone is connected to your laptop, its brand software could also do whatever it wants, whenever it wants. To check if it's a cpu-resource related you can start a game, push ctrl-alt-del and see the task manager - process tab - sorted by cpu time. To check the temperatures I suggest you install and run HWiNFO, in sensors-only mode.

Well, for GPU temperatures I would suggest GPU-Z.

sounds like a software issue to me tbh
on top of what others have already suggested:
- remove any windows updates you've recently had
- remove any useless crap you've recently installed
- kill and remove your useless anti-virus software and see if that helps

could also try live-booting a clean portable windows from a flash drive and playing the game there to confirm it has nothing to do with your gpu

Thanks! I looked at the taskmanager while ingame and found that there was a mysqld.exe using up close to 500mb of memory, and taking a look at my startup found mcafee in the list for some reason (I thought I had taken it out). There doesn't seem to be anything draining cpu usage though. Regardless it seems that the game is at least playable now, though it still lags whenever it loads new audio specifically (death/attack/whatever sounds or simply new music). Fights especially are a bit of a nuisance due to freezes, but only at their start. Other than that the game is perfectly smooth. Weird :-\

Audio codecs/sound driver issue?

Yeah I'm going to re-install the audio drivers now to see if that does something

Did you by any chance install something like CCCP?

Does it mostly occurs while accessing the hard disk? (you mentioned loading new audio) If so your hard disk might be going bad.

I haven't installed any codecs of any sort in a long time no
Ooh I hope not :P There is some sort of harddrive diagnostic thing that I can run via Vaio Care (its a sony vaio laptop) and I'll leave that on tonight. In the meantime I'm going to try and reinstall directx

Yeah it was a bit of a long shot :P