is windows media player causing laptop to freeze?

[irishtaz]

Hi I hope someone can help me. I am still quite a novice user, so I hope my explanation below is understandable.

Yesterday morning when I turned my laptop on ( acer aspire 5535 vista 32b) there was a problem with it freezing when anything was clicked on, and going really slowly when not freezing. I restarted it a couple of times and it ran normally for rest of the day. Today when I turned the laptop on there was a black screen with writing i didnt understand. I saw the words chkdsc and bootmgr.exe.mui. eventually the laptop loaded but the same problem of freezing when anything is clicked on and going really slow. I tried opening the task manager as the frozen programs were not responding and after pressing ctrl alt del the screen went black with an error message 'failure- security options' . After approx 5mins of this black screen the normal laptop bacground appeared with a loading symbol 'please wait'. After ten mins of this screen I turned laptop off by holding down power button.

I restarted in safe mode and and laptop was working fine- no freezing or slow. I opened programs one by one and all seemed fine except windows media player. It will not open, no matter how many times triex to. There is no error message, just nothing happens. As this seems to be the only program acting weird, does this mean that media player is causing all the problems? What can I do to fix it as I don't seem to be able to uninstall it? I tried system restore but get the message "no restore points have been created on your computer system disk".

Also, is it ok to use gimp and web easy in safe mode until I get this sorted?

Any help would be very much appreciated.

 

[Alexffiala]

I'm not extremely familiar with Vista, but it could be possible that your Operating system became corrupted somehow.

Do you have any recent restore points that you can load to? A restore point is basically a point in your systems history that can be loaded to eliminate any irregular changes made since said restore point was created. Think of it as a type of "reset to earlier time" thing.

Windows media player can be a very... difficult program, depending on your computer. It is hardware intensive and sucks a lot of RAM.

If all else fails and you're still experiencing these issues, back-up your data, and then run the Vista system repair utility.

The below link has a tutorial about how to do this.

http://www( )bleepingcomputer( )com/tutorials/repair-windows-with-windows-startup-repair/

 

[irishtaz]

Thanks for taking the time to reply. Unfortunately when I tried system restore it said that there was no restore point in the system (that is a mistake I will not make again! ) I don't think that I have a recovery disc, can that be downloaded?
Does anybody know if it is possible to uninstall media player by itself? Any thoughts are very much appreciated.

 

[Alexffiala]

Can you provide me with your model information of your PC? I'm going to take a shot in the dark and say it's >4 years old. If that's true, you're probably experiencing your problems simply because of the age of the machine and its component hardware.

You can uninstall WMP, this link provides information on how to do that:

http://ww()ehow()com/how_6676867_uninstall-media-player-11on-vista.html

 

[carnageX]

From command prompt (ran as Admin), type in this:
sfc /scannow

If that doesn't find any problems, run a disk check from the command prompt as well:
chkdsk c: /f /r
It will say it cannot lock the current drive; type Y and hit enter and then reboot and it should go through 5 stages, which may take a while.

Also, make sure you update all of your drivers (sound, video, network, chipset).

 

[brayo1985]

uninstall the media player this a load of stress then install something like media player 123 classic its nice to use.
and the slow down your getting try running some cleaners and optimizer's see if they make your system any faster gd luck