Need help with Sudden Overheat

Goob

just recently, maybe about 2 weeks ago my laptop has had a problem where it overheats very quickly and with most of my games.  I travel back and forth from school with it a lot so maybe the cooling system came loose?  I opened the laptop up and cleaned the fans, but there was little dust in it.  I didnt have any thermal paste at the time so i didnt remove the cooler.  Is there a way to tell if the cooler has loosened if I open it up again?  I'm gonna get some thermal paste soon and change it but If i dont have to i won't. Any other tips for stopping a laptop from thermal throttling, my fps has taken a huge hit because of it all of the sudden.
Specs: (Acer Predator 17 G9-793-78CM 17.3'')
CPU: i7 6700HQ - 2.6 GHz
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 - 8GB GDDR5

xapim

@Goob well seems to me you need to repaste it as u said its 2.5 years old and im supposing you never had repasted it before its recommended to repaste it once per year on heavy usage gaming laptops and also have u undervolted/optimized windows and i recommend kryonaut or similar