My Acer Nitro 5 (AN517-52) has suddenly had a significant performance drop and RAM usage increase

• Specs:

• 8GM RAM
• 1650 GTX Nvidia Graphics Card
• Intel i5-10300H CPU

I've had my laptop for about 2 years and about 5 days ago I was able to reach a very stable 60+ FPS on many games but now my general laptop performance has decreased and has especially impacted gaming performance and FPS (large, frequent lag spikes) on a lot of previously stable games (Fortnite, Elden Ring, RDR2, etc). I am currently using high power mode, have the latest Nvidia graphics driver, disabled almost all start-up processes, checked for viruses and haven't had any notable software updates or changes to my device just before the issues started. It seemed like one day it was performing as expected, and the next it wasn't.

Task manager doesn't appear to show any likely culprits using very high amounts of ram and I believe that all running programs have simply become less efficient. More memory is being used than usual (was around 20% on idle and is now 40% on idle) and my fans can be heard faintly on idle unlike before, so my laptop is likely under more stress for some reason.

This isn't the first time I've had this issue and a few months ago I had a professional backup my files and reinstall windows to reset any programs/drivers that may have been causing the issue, so I am almost certain that this is a software issue and not a hardware issue. This fixed the issue but it has returned and I want to diagnose exactly what is causing the issue this time.

I'd like to clarify that 8GB of RAM had worked perfectly beforehand and I am not considering a RAM upgrade and would instead like to find out the cause of this issue and fix it. I suspect that it is some form of driver or software issue. Please help.