Can heavy gaming effect a pc?

[Mattlen]

Hi, I need to find out if heavy gaming can fry a cpu or anyother part of a pc. Or the whole pc itself. I ask this because I have ben playing fallout new vegas on my laptop. I have an acer aspire 7741z-5731 model. It has 3gb ddr3 ram memory, 250gb hhd, the processor is a ...p6000 1.87ghz. I assume this is lingo for an i3 processor? Not too sure on what the graphics card is, even after having this pc for about 5 months. All I can find is intel(R) graphics media accelerator HD. It does not give a name of what the actual card is. Or maybe It does, i've just never seen a name like the above for a graphics car before.
The processor is dual core. So two cores. I will admit I'm not very computer savy, but I have done allot of trial and errors before and I have a pretty good hang on using programs, finding out issues etc. I just do not know hard ware too well. Anyways bottom line is I've ben playing fallout new vegas. It runs good on the pc.
There is a small amount of frame studdering at times and in a bloom moon, maybe after about 2 hours of play to three you get audio skipping, or dialog reading skipping for a few seconds. But other then that, the graphics look good, and it plays well. It might get heavier frame studdering in high 3d generated areas, or in a massive shoot out etc. But I'm very impressed with how it plays.
Well last night after the gaming session I did have some issues with the internet cutting out, Im on a wirless router connection. My roommate tends to download allot so I figured it was conflict of him pulling so much from the internet. And this has happened before with him. And the pc ran smoothly. It was a little hot, but I have a cooling pad that cools it down good.
Well I got on today, and the computer lagged a good amount. So I checked, I assume I had too much stuff on the pc. As ive ben told when you get so much data and spaced used on the hd that it will ware the computer down. So I checked and I had 34gb of data in the recycle ben. So I got rid of it. The computer still lagged. So I got on to look around and ask on the internet what the deal was/is. The interenet kept giving me internet not connected etc. Speacialy when I went to check my email.
After about the 4th time of refreshing the browser it went to my email and I could web serve with ease. The internet seemed to lagg some. So my question is can heavy gaming cause these issues? I love the game, but if it is going to harm my pc Ill get rid of it. Thanks for the replys in advance.

EDIT: I restarted the pc and it seems to be normal. No lagg, no internet issues. So I dont know what was going on.

 

[CarlC]

The gaming won`t be affecting the internet, unless say your online and your roomate goes one it,in which case u might get some lag.But in no case should it effect the hardware unless it isn`t getting proper ventilation.
The studdering issues is most likely down to the card,because since it isn`t a dedicated GC like in a PC.The CPU has to work twice as hard to run it,and the graphics needed is taken from the Graphics Chip unless you exceed the limit on the chip,in which case it is taken from the memory,e.g you want to play FNV at 512mb but your GC only have 256mb, the laptop will take the rest of the memory to display the graphics from the 3GB ram u have?

Have you also checked to see if any of your programs are updating,and what programs you have running in the background?

I hope i`ve been of some help.