I have never had any issues with my computer before, but recently Ive had a lot of problems and Im resorting to tech talk for your help.

Anytime I try to play an mp3, whether I use winamp or windows media player, my computer will freeze until the song finishes playing. I can hear the audio and media player works, but anyting I click on will not work until the song is finished playing.

I have reformated 2 times and gone through the adaware, spyboy, ccleaner, and symantec scans, still no success. I have updated the drivers from the hp website as well.

My question is, what could be the reason behind this? Any possible solutions?

Some stats about the computer:
HP Laptop
1.5ghz Intel Centrino
1gb ram
80gb HD
cd-rw/dvd-rw

6/26/2007 7:50:32 PM

Hmmm I'd normally think this was some sorter of driver conflict.

Are there any conflicts in device manager?


What version of windows is this?

6/26/2007 7:53:05 PM

its windows XP Home,

I checked the device manager, and everything under sound is listed as workign properly, no real issues there, shouldn't that have been fixed with the driver updates from HP?

[Edited on June 26, 2007 at 8:07 PM. Reason : sfd]

[Edited on June 26, 2007 at 8:07 PM. Reason : asf]

6/26/2007 8:05:11 PM

Did you try updating your BIOS?

This sounds like a driver conflict to me too... possibly something with the interrupts and the sound hardware.

6/26/2007 8:32:56 PM

ok, so i talked to HP, and they told me to run a hard disk self test, and I did that and it failed.

He said that I need a new harddrive, which is weird to me, but maybe I dont know how it all works together.

I did update my bios as well... still had the problem

do you guys think it could be the HD?

6/26/2007 9:25:07 PM

Idk...it's a possibility. does the same thing occur whenever you try to play a video or anything else? If HP will fix it under warranty, I'd just back up my data and let 'em have at it. If not, you can always try another HDD and see if you can duplicate the problem.

6/27/2007 8:48:20 AM

anyone figure this out?

6/27/2007 2:22:42 PM

sounds like two possibilities.

one the Hard Drive has gone bad and is defaulting back to some PIO mode or some craziness like that.

the other is if the onboard sound has blown a gasket and the chip's hardware acceleration is causing it.

Try turning off hardware acceleration completely in your audio properties (Control Panel->Sounds and Audio Devices->Volume->Speaker Settings->Advanced->Performance->Audio Playback - Hardware Acceleration OR Control Panel->Sounds and Audio Devices->Audio->Sound Playback->Advanced->Performance->Audio Playback - Hardware Acceleration)

and play it through media player, see what happens.

To troubleshoot the HD being the issue, turn off your page file (Control Panel->System->Advanced->Performance - Settings -> Advanced -> Virtual Memory -> Set to no paging file) restart, and try playing a song off of a data CD or a thumbdrive.

6/27/2007 3:03:59 PM

thanks for all the help guys, it ended up being the harddrive.
I changed that out, reinstalled everything and everything is working perfectly now, thanks for all your help!
-t

6/28/2007 9:03:29 AM