Format or not to format.

[Astrid]

Well, recently, I haven't formatted in about a year's time

You mean defragmentation? As formatting does not really do any good. And no, after a year your disk won't be as extremely fragmented to cause the problems you have.

I've had to turn down to high, some low settings, going below 50, but avg 60. It could be my CPU, I could overclock it, atm it's a i5 750 at stock, 2.66ghz, but I'm not sure.

No need to over clock. Install speedfan and check if your stuff is overheating. If so, clean/replace fans and component paste.

Also; in some games, in darker areas, I've been getting faint grey-ish black lines across my screen, hardly noticeable, but you know, they're there, and it bothers me.

Turn Vsync on (Not recommended, eats a lot of memory) and check your graphics card driver software for extra options.

Now, Black Ops 2, I run it maxed out everything on, highest, w/e, I'm getting stuttering issues, freezing issues, lag, everything, but I get 150-200 FPS, never below 85.

Try running on all lowest graphics and see if it persists. If it's not the case, try upping/downing each setting individually to see what causes it.

Maybe my HDD is just clustered, obviously it's not a bottleneck by my CPU, as it wouldn't cause that, would it?

How can a HDD bottleneck a CPU to such extreme extents?

How can a HDD bottleneck a CPU to such extreme extents?

I didn't mean the CPU would bottleneck the HDD, I meant the GPU.

Try running on all lowest graphics and see if it persists. If it's not the case, try upping/downing each setting individually to see what causes it.

Turned Mesh quality to low on BF3, went from avg 50-70fps to avg 80-100, stutters and freezes are VERY rare now, I've been playing since 11am this morning, it's now 8pm, haven't had one stutter or freeze. *touches wood*

No need to over clock. Install speedfan and check if your stuff is overheating. If so, clean/replace fans and component paste.

Nope, everything is normal and fine, 35-40c idle temps, 65-70 when playing BF3 and Far Cry 3.

Turn Vsync on (Not recommended, eats a lot of memory) and check your graphics card driver software for extra options.

No problem with that, it's only even hardly noticeable in dark areas, in such a bright and vibrant game in BF3, Blops 2 and Far Cry 3, can't see it at all.

You mean defragmentation? As formatting does not really do any good. And no, after a year your disk won't be as extremely fragmented to cause the problems you have.

Yup, thought so.

Thanks for both of your help, much appreciated, I uninstalled games and some applications today, about 10-15 and things are much better, hopefully not temporary. If the problems arise again, I'll be sure to post here; so if the thread is inactive for 2-5 days, don't close it please, I dunno though, probably just focusing on the frame-rate and worrying about problems too much to concentrate on the game. Everything is perfect now and hopefully it keeps that way, BF3 is hell'a fun when you can focus on smooth gameplay. Been getting rubberbanding sometimes, but meh, Virgin Media being Virgin media.