hardware or software problems?

[tenaciousdave]

Hi all, I'm having difficulty playing back divx movies. Not sure what the exact problem is though. Some of the films I've downloaded play perfectly with excellent quality sound and video. (I have all the latest codecs etc...)

But with some movie files will play for a couple of mins then freeze and then everything freezes and I have to manually restart my machine with the off button. I'm using a sony pcg-fx502 laptop, which is only about a year old at this stage. It has 258mb ram, 8mb ATI Rage Mobility-M1 AGP, but a 1.00Ghz AMD Duron processor. I'm not sure if this is causing the problem as the same video files (transfered from my machine to another through a lan) work fine, and this is on machines with half the ram and celeronM processors.

Would greatly appreciate it if someone could point me in the right direction.

Cheers

[Enchanter]

It is likely to be a hardware (overheating) problem. Try reinstalling your codecs and graphic driver, and see whether it solves the problems.

[UncasMS]

i experienced a similar problems quite a while ago with a new abit mainboard.

updating my chipsetdrivers (via 4in1 - now called hyperion) solved my problems.