Laptop freezing when watching videos

[spangar]

I have an Acer Aspire 7740 laptop. I've had it for a long time, probably around 2007 or 08. I know that's old but I'm not trying to do anything crazy with it. Recently went back to school and when I have a break in classes I like to watch Netflix or Amazon Prime. When watching a video it will randomly freeze and the audio will have a very crazy noise (slows down to an insanely slow speed or just makes alien type noises and the picture not moving at all.) I lose all control of my laptop and the only way to get it to stop is to do a hard reset. Is there a way to check memory or what can be causing this.

I have an intel i3 330M processor
4GB DDR3

It does not seem to be getting hot when I do anything on it.

Probably time to upgrade but I never use this thing except for this and I have a nice desktop that I spend most of my time on. Don't want to pay the convenience fee for a decent laptop.

Thanks in advance

 

[Boogieman_WD]

Hey there, spangar.

Backup any important data which you might have written on it, just as a precaution. After that go ahead and download an HDD diagnostic tool to test the drive for errors and/or bad sectors and see if anything out of the ordinary pops-up.
Other than that I'd suggest that you check all the drivers for the laptops components and reinstall them, or update them if they have newer versions.

Please let me know how everything goes.
Boogieman_WD

 

[Jatheon]

Did you try to disable the hardware acceleration flash?