Mass Effect 2 and sudden poor frame rate

My friend was going through Mass Effect trilogy and suffered sudden drops of frame rate in Mass Effect 2 mid-game and we were going through possible workarounds to solve her problems.  After all the tests, it turns out it was as simple as disabling the Origin overlay.  Damn crazy!

LA Noire - Poor Performance and Possible Solution

I had suffered through more than half of the game with such appalling performance on LA Noire on my aging Vista laptop.  I'm not one to complain so I chucked it off as just less than low performance.  It's almost like my Witcher 2 days coming back to haunt me.  On one particular case, the frame rate woes were really starting to get grating so I just had to dig up information on this.

All my graphical settings were set to low and I was playing on an 800x600 window and it was still stuttering.  The only option I didn't touch was 'Threading' which I left at Multi.  It seems like my research has lead me to believe that the game has issues with the threading on specific hardware (e.g. dual core processors) so I took a leap of faith.

Changing the Threading to Single was the kind of performance change I needed.  The improvements were dramatic and the game was playing fairly smoothly now.  I feel like a fool for even tolerating such poor performance.  Now it's time once again to find where the performance threshold is on my Intel Core 2 Duo laptop.  I hope this helps others who are suffering from performance woes.