Shackleton

background: my machine is running windows 7 home premium, it has a 1TB hard disk and 6GB of ram. the CPU is a quad core AMD Athlon II running at 2.4Ghz, and the video card is a GeForce 9900 w/512MB RAM.

normally, i have no trouble running games like battlefield 2 or IL2 sturmovik at a minimum of 60 frames per second. however, for the past 2 years, i have had issues with it randomly deciding to drop the framerates down to 10 fps. after 5 minutes of this, it reverts to 60 fps, before going back 5 minutes later. it does this for stretches spanning around 8 weeks, before going back to normal for a few weeks. it does this even in low-resource games, battlefield 1942 will run at 10fps, despite it's normal 150! needless to say, it's VERY irritating and any solutions to this problem would be greatly appreciated.

a little extra: my laptop runs these games beautifully (with a 1.6Ghz dual core, 3gb ram, win7, home premium) so that just adds to the confusion.

i am looking to upgrade my desktop CPU, which currently uses an AMD Athlon II x4 620 processor (2.60 GHz) to an AMD Phenom II x4 965 black edition (3.4GHz). both make use of the same socket (an AM3 socket) and are both 45nm. however, since i have never done anything like this before, i figured it would be best to ask for a little help from some more experienced people, before i buy/screw up anything. if it helps, i have windows 7 home premium (64 bit, service pack 1). so, do any of you know if i am indeed able to upgrade to this processor? also, does anyone know what the wattage of the athlon is? i have been told it is important.

if you need any more info, ask and i will edit it in.

if it helps:

Phenom:

AMD Phenom II X4 965 Black Edition, 125W, AM3, 8MB Cache, 3400MHz

athlon:

AM3, 2MB cache (maybe?), 2600MHz

basically, i would like to explore a few mods for minecraft (mainly the plane mod and millienaire) but i need to install ModLoader. i have tried to intall it a few times to no avail. can anyone help me? i just cant figure out where to put the modloader files. (by the way, i have a Windows 7 PC, if it helps)