[How To] A guide to fixing vista issues.

So I've had this laptop for 5+ months now (got it used frommy parents) and not only maple, but pretty much any game (I mainly try to plaY LoL now) will drop to an incredibly low fps every few minutes and make almost any game unplayable, maple included. Would this be due to my graphics card or ram or what? I'm currently performing a system recovery to restore it to factory setttings to see if that helps, but I'm scared it won't last long.
I'll get specifics on the system after it's done resetting.