This is probably going to be a really long and fluffy description of my fairly-simple-to-explain problem, since I ramble a lot at three in the morning, plus I already hate when I feel I didn't explain myself thoroughly, but here we go.

Lately my desktop computer's been having this weird performance issue when I play games, and it's been getting worse. I'll be playing a game, and it can be pretty much any game, from Super Meat Boy to Resident Evil 5 to Minecraft to Left 4 Dead, and it'll be running smoothly until it randomly decides to seize up and be a jerk to me for about a full minute, at which point the game'll slow down a little, to maybe 70% speed (not too much), and the frame rate'll drop to about one frame per second while the audio lags chopilly. If I'm playing something single-player I can just pause and wait for it to stop (It DOES "lag" while paused, and it is not any better. Trying to navigate a game's pause menu while this is going on is painful.), but if I'm doing something online like Left 4 Dead it obviously gets in the way of things. Furthermore, for the last two or three days it's been doing it more frequently, like every ten minutes or so. That kind of frequency pretty much renders my games unplayable.

I don't have my computer's specs on-hand, but if you want them I can post them tomorrow. It's running Windows 7, if that helps. Most of the games I know this affects are Steam games, but not all of them. Minecraft and RE5 are good enough examples of non-Steam games that do this. I have no idea what's doing this, or even what it's doing, but I'm starting to think it's either a piece of hardware dying or something wrong with Windows. I don't think it's a matter of me not meeting a game's system requirements or having outdated drivers because I've seen it happen on almost much every game I play on that computer. I'm not sure if it's ever happened on any windowed games, though I do remember a few months ago my Dream Seekers used to lag horribly and freeze up every few minutes. They don't do it anymore, so it might've been a BYOND bug that got fixed.

I do not know which games do this more often than others, so I can't really decide if a certain hardware device is causing the problem. I don't think it's my graphics card because games like Minecraft and Super Meat Boy will do this just as often as Resident Evil 5 or Borderlands.

As far as what I've tried to do to fix this, not too much. At one point it was doing this more often when I played Left 4 Dead online than when I played solo, and reinstalling it changed that, but that's the only thing I've done that even helped. It didn't even fix the problem; it just made it happen less when I played online. I've also tried changing settings such as turning down graphics, but that hasn't helped. However, I have not tried anything that might remedy a problem that affects nearly every game on my computer, such as formatting and reinstalling Windows. I should probably do that and see if it works, but first I wanna know if anyone thinks my processor might be about to die or something. As much as I don't want my computer to be dying, I don't know why else a game could run smoothly for ten minutes and then less-smoothly for the next two.