Hi all, my husband is an avid gamer and just got a new PC. Since I didn't have one, I took over his old PC - it's about a decade old now. I have been playing some video games on it with very low requirements (think cozy games with low CPU usage). They were working great until my kid kept force shutting down the computer, and one time, when I turned it back on, none of my games would run smoothly, with graphics super laggy. Videos like YouTube run fine and everything else seems to be running the same as always. I know how old the computer is and my expectations are relatively low, but I thought I would ask here because gaming seems to be the only thing I can't do.

I mainly am trying to be able to play modest games again (I'm hardly trying to play Rust or RDR2, just smaller games like Stardew Valley or Two Point games). My PC uses ethernet direct connection, not wifi, and everything was fine until a few weeks ago. My RAM usage seems a little high (around 45%) but I haven't done anything different, and that doesn't seem horrible or anything.

If anyone thinks I should cross post this elsewhere, please let me know!

Since having these issues, I have tried:

-Defragging

-Updating driver

-Cleaning up PC storage

-Checking CPU usage, especially while playing said games (stays pretty low)

-Uninstalling and reinstalling Steam and specific games

-Scanning for malware, trojans, etc.

-Memory diagnostics, etc.

Some specs on my PC:

-NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 6 GB Graphics

-16 GB RAM

-315 GB/1 TB storage used

-INTEL Core i7 7700 CPU @ 4.2 GHz Processor

-Windows 10 OS