Advice to keep FW Laptop 13 from getting laggy? Port retimer helps temporarily

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Our family Framework Laptop 13 (Intel 12th gen, Core i7-1280p, 32GB RAM, Windows 11 252H, Iris Xe graphics 128MB), used a lot by my kid for videogames like Roblox, is really laggy. Software is slow to load, new browser tabs appear only after a delay, letters appear on screen slower than I type them, restarting doesn’t fix. Task Manager shows very low CPU usage (~5% right now, for example).

I thought maybe a BIOS update would help, and seemingly it did, but then it got very laggy again shortly. By trial and error I discovered the laptop gets nice and snappy again after just running the port retimer utilities that come along with the BIOS update. But it gets slower again not long afterward — 10 or 30 minutes, typically. I don’t know if the port retimer utility is actually directly helping or just resetting something in the system somehow.

Any advice on how to get this snappiness to stick around?

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Is it getting warm in use? I wonder if the CPU’s frequency limiter is kicking in.

3

The fan will blow when doing some pretty routine work, but the laptop isn’t hot and the lagginess occurs even when CPU usage is very low, like <5% as shown in Task Manager. And it never stops, even across reboots, until I run the port retimer utility. After which the lagginess comes back after a few minutes or once, about an hour.