video card drops framerate

ok so i have a new G72X quad core laptop with a GTX 260 graphics card and windows 7. My issue is that when playing games such as WoW sometimes the framerate goes down to like 2. Sometimes it randomly drops (last time this happened i was going from a highly populated area to a pretty much empty area, i got to the empty area and had 2 fps). What confused me was that i was in dalaran the most populated city in the game with the highest settings possible with normal fps, then i decided to make a level 1 character on a different server and had 2 fps... then logged back into the highly populated area and it was working fine. I also though it could be addons but i tried playing another game (Mass Effect) and was having issues with it aswell. I then restarted and it began working normally, and i played for several hours and had no issues at all. It seems to be a pretty random thing that happens. I have never had it happen when first turning on my pc and starting up a game though, so it led me to suspect its not getting properly cooled, but it still wouldn't explain why it would work on one WoW character and then not another. I have also tired uninstalling and reinstalling the video card driver, but it gave the same issue.