My Laptop freezes while playing video

[Phanos]

Hi Tom Johnson,

I have upgraded my laptop last year through an HP distributor, so my ram is, as far as I can tell, from HP. Besides the problem occurred even before I upgrade my ram.

We do have the same driver for our graphic card. I upgrade to this driver some time ago hopping to solve this annoying freezing problem, but I end up with more problems.

At first the drivers would not install. The application that tried to install the drivers kept locking up and I had to stop it through task manager. After trying a couple of times and restarting a few times my laptop, I got it working. However in the beginning I was getting a lot of blue screens, (stop error according to windows), but eventually for some reasons their frequency became to rare and now I can use my laptop even that from time to time I do yet blue screens.

I will try to contact ATI next week hopping that they will be able to help. If I do find something I will post it here and let you know.

Thanks for the reply

Kind Regards,

Phanos

[Phanos]

Hi Tom Johnson,

I just went to the ATI website. It seems that the ATI does not have telephone or email support for mobility radeon graphic card for laptop/notebooks.

Also in the list of model that are supported by catalyst, our graphic card model "mobility radeon 9000" is not included.

Currenly I am not going to check either if these drivers can also wok with our laptop. This laptop has enough problems as it is :). But I will keep looking. :)

Kind Regards,

Phanos

[Doubtfire]

Phanos,

I also have the same laptop. I can use Real Player, Windows Media Player and Quicktime with no issues.
When I use Intervideo WinDVD 4 I can play the introduction ads, use my USB Logitech MS700 mouse to bypass the chapters but as soon as I click on play for the main movie it freezes. I also have to hard boot the laptop as no response is received from any keystrokes.
I do not use the touchpad ever - when I am on the road I use a Logitech compact cordless laptop mouse. My laptop is under warranty however they want the thing for several weeks with no loaner, unfortunately it is my business and I can't afford the loss of it.
I am not a regular DVD user, just happened to try and use it on the weekend and ran into issues. I ended up playing it with Windows Media Player however you could tell the difference in resolution.
I was already setup with the changes that Con Ad indicated.

Just wondering if anyone has any other suggestions (yes I have all the latest and greatest). Running 1.256 GB of RAM, all other devices are standard HP issue.

Thanks a bunch :)
Doubt

[Phanos]

Hi Doubtfire,

if your laptop freezes only when you press the play button of windvd then your problem might be related to that particular problem. I suppose you try to uninstall and and reinstall the windvd player, right?

Try installing some other program for playing dvds and see if that works ok. Also try checking your hard disk for errors.

I do not have that much memory on my laptop. I have only 768MB of ram, so I do not know if I get more than 1 GB ram will at least fix my windows media player, real player and quick time player issues :).


Hope you fix your problem. I know how annoying can it get.

Kind Regards,

Phanos

[Mindzablank]

Although an IRQ (interrupt request) conflict on the motherboard power supplies between the mouse and graphics card may be the issue, there is another possibility to explore regarding the graphics card capabilities. There may be a different model/spec of graphics card fitted in a laptop compared to similar laptops, explaining why some have the 'media freeze' issue, and others do not.

On my PC I have to switch off Direct Draw Acceleration or every media file will freeze the mouse when played - the media file will not continue to play video, only sound, and the mouse pointer sticks, making the computer unusable without a reboot. As to why it should do this when a mouse is moved while a movie is successfully playing on a laptop it may be related to the fact that a mouse screen pointer requires output from the graphics card at the same time as the movie is placing high demand.

Type dxdiag into Start/Run and on the Display tab disable 'Direct Draw Acceleration' and see if this cures the problem. You can always set it back again. The downside of disabling it may be that some programs requiring it, for example Nero Showtime, may not function, but on my PC all other media players work (Realplayer, VLC, DIVX, PowerDVD, Mediaplayer etc).

[Phanos]

Dear Mindzablank,

thanks for the reply. I have tried your suggestion and after two hours of movie playback no freezing occurred so far :). I will test it for a couple of days more to make sure that this is actually a fix for me regarding this problem. I had in the past thought that I had solved this problem but after a day or two the problem reappeared for no obvious reason.

I only have two questions for you regarding your suggestion please. The first question is that if my laptop has such a problem why others with the same laptop do not have reported similar issues? I mean there must be a lot of people that must have this model, shouldnâ t at lease a lot of them have experience similar issues. And secondly I already have contact HP support a couple of months ago and they told me that they tested this particular model with no problems. How is this possible? I mean shouldnâ t all the models have the same graphic card and therefore the same problem?

Do you mean that the same laptop models can be shipped with different graphic cards? Hope you can shed a little more light to this problem because we really need it. This problem is very annoying.

Thanks a lot.

Phanos

[Mindzablank]

Yes, during a production run the same model of a laptop may have a series of slightly different motherboards fitted which may have different built-in graphics chips, or they may have different modules or memory expansion chips manually fitted on the motherboard by the laptop assembly factory before shipping to retailer/customer. It's an area of laptop design where manufacturers often skimp and save - small, low resolution laptop screens don't usually require high spec graphics capabilities (unless designed as a media centre 'desktop replacement').

Software could also explain differences in performance - for example you used a Linux installation without this problem - that may be explained by Direct X (which includes Direct Draw) being a Windows feature. Or other users may be using a monitor/laptop screen set to a low resolution & refresh rate/luminence which isn't overburdening the graphics system.

[Phanos]

Hi Mindzablank,

thank a lot for the reply. Yes this would explain why my laptop works great while playing video in Linux but freezes while playing video in windows. Why they produce a laptop which is design for microsoft windows XP but works better in Linux that I don't understand :).

After two days no freezing occurred so far :). I have used many video files that in the past they had freeze my computer almost immediately. Also I was able to play TV (using a tv card that I bought recently) and browse the internet at the same time without any freezing.

My only problem now is that when the direct draw is disable the tv quality is lower than when the direct draw is enable, but for now I can live with that. I can always enable the direct draw when I want to watch tv in full screen or capture some tv program on my hard drive.

Mindzablank I only have one more question for you please. Do you think that this problem will ever go away entirely? I mean could it be fix with a driver or bios update or something? It will be nice to actually be able to rid this problem entirely.

For now I am sticking with your fix though. It sures is better to hae that does not freeze than one that does :).

Again thanks a lot,

Phanos

[Doubtfire]

Hi Mindzablank,

Tried your options and it is not working for me. I am getting the error "Create Overlay Failed. Please lower your screen resolution or colour depth and try again." Not sure if it is because I am using a widescreen monitor - tried a bunch a of things. Went to 1024x768 (I run 1280x800) reduced colour, checked my dx colour settings and nothing really to change there. I did have it working once with Direct Draw on the regular tab set with the performance to use hardware acceleration (although I think it reset the settings you advised to turn off). However it was not playing the screen only the sound and I could move the mouse around.

Like I said before not like I use it alot but drives me nuts to have something on my pc that wont work regardless.

[Mindzablank]

Hi doubtfire,

That screen message appears to be a common WinDVD issue, and is often attributed to a conflict with Windows NetMeeting.

NetMeeting allows authorised remote access to your desktop, rather like a limited network over the internet, together with a webcam video teleconferencing facility (which will be where the graphics overlay is implicated), and it is enabled by default.

If you never use it as part of your business activity, disable it. Click Start/Settings/Control Panel/Administrative Tools/Services. Double click on NetMeeting Remote. On the General tab select Disable from the drop down menu on Startup Type. Click Apply. Reboot the laptop.

If that doesn't fix the problem, a switch from WinDVD to PowerDVD may be the answer - both Phanos and myself are using PowerDVD with Direct Draw disabled. You can download a 30-day free trial version from : http://www.powerdvd.com-http.com/download-7.html

or -

As you already have Realplayer installed, but have poor quality DVD playback, read questions 4 & 6 on this link about picture quality and how to disable 'Optimized Video' in Realplayer.
http://service.real.com/help/faq/rp8/rpb8back.html

Presently, with this enabled, Realplayer may be fooled into thinking you have a better graphics system than you have.