Any type of movie file freezes computer completely.

So I have an external monitor connected to my laptop. If I start a movie file and it opens up on the external one, it just freezes and this makes the rest of the computer dog slow, even tho there is not excessive cpu or memory usage.

When I end the process, it just freezes the computer completely, can't even move the mouse. I have to do a hard shutdown to fix it.

I realized that starting movies on the main laptop lcd and then moving them to the external fixes this somewhat, but even then the movie freezes every once in a while and once again I have to reboot.

I have tried different gpu drivers, both from ati and the oem ones, I have re-imaged my computer to the factory OS, I have reformatted and installed xp fresh, I have used different versions of Media Player and other players (winamp, divx, etc.) and nothing helps.

I'm wondering if this is a hardware problem, but I just can't see it. Everything else works fine, it doesn't freeze in games, just when watching any sort of movie file (mpg, wmv, avi). And it's not corrupt files, this happens when I stream stuff online too.

Any help, the computer in question is in my sig.

 

are you sure that you have all the proper media codecs?

 

The only codecs I have are the latest divx ones (6.6). I really don't know what other ones to get, and these have always worked for me. I forgot to mention that I also tried different versions of it, ones that worked fine before, which is why I'm starting to rule out software incompatibilities.

Are there any other free codecs I can try?

 

Try the Combined Community Coded Pack (CCCP).