Stuttering in games

[phantom_jo]

My friend just bought an acer aspire 4745G laptop. It has I5 460, 2GB ram, HD 5650.
With this laptop he's able to play street fighter 4, left 4 dead 2, COD MW2 with quite the details.
However in COD he experienced stuttering every few frames although the game itself can run(not lagging).
I thought it was the RAM, but when checked in task manager memory usage reached only to around 1.7-1.8 GB.
Can the Video Card be faulty? We can't seem to find a newer driver from the Acer's website and AMD's reference driver can't be installed to the laptop. Any way around this?
Can the hard drive cause this problem?

I hope you guys can chime in and give you thoughts on this matter. Thank You.

[sswilson]

I'm wondering how much COD accesses the HDD. Have you tried a defrag to ensure that all files are co-located for easy access?

What OS is he running? Have you tried lower quality settings?

[KaptCrunch]

i see a fix for cpu cycling in bios 1.18, also sound driver and chipset

[LarkStarr]

also simply check on your background processes, make sure they aren't stealing time from the CPU. you could try and set the process priority of CoD to high to see if that helps.

[phantom_jo]

Thank You for everyone who has chimed in. I will try what you have suggested and report back later. Meanwhile, anyone else who have suggestions please do share. Thank You.

[Shozzking]

I've had issues with ATi drivers before (it caused micro stuttering in total war). Try using CCleaner to uninstall the ATi drivers in safe mode and then reboot and reinstall the newest version of the drivers (10.9). If that doesnt help then try installing an older driver version (like 10.5 or 10.4)