My laptop sometimes runs slowly and sometimes runs smoothly.

Hi,

If the laptop is “noisy” when you are gaming perhaps the laptop may be overheating slightly and the fan is struggling to cope on high speed.

Can you feel the air coming out of the laptop’s fan vent?

Is the laptop’s fan vent clean and unobstructed?

Here’s a link to the section in the service manual which describes the necessary pre-requisite steps and then the procedure to access the heat sink and fan so that you can check. You can also check if the fan is OK.

Also, perhaps the thermal paste applied to the CPU may have dried out and it is no longer as effective as it used to be in helping to transfer the heat away from the CPU, (aided by the heat sink and fan), and it needs to be refreshed.

Search online for how to do this.

If your laptop is running progressively slower and the hard drive activity LED is blinking constantly, use this Lenovo IdeaPad U530 Touch is Running Progressively Slower problem page for possible causes and solutions.