Sorry your browser is not supported!

As the title says, my laptop here is blue screening extremely frequently and I can't get anything done because of it. I'm not entirely sure what the exact cause of it is, as it has been doing it since I got it a few years ago, but it's gotten extremely frequent over the past few days and the only noticeable trend present throughout the BSODs is that it has something to do with video being played.

If I leave my computer playing a playlist on YouTube for more than an hour or so, give or take, then it freezes and bluescreens. Something that's entirely reproducible is the fact that whenever I render a video in Camtasia Studio for longer than 45 minutes, it always bluescreens. ALWAYS. I've searched and searched for a way to fix the problem with Camtasia Studio for the last two days, and I'm to the point of giving up on rendering this .camrec video. I've been rendering plenty of videos similar to this one, and it's went flawlessly up until now. Nothing has changed with my system that I'm aware of, so it really puzzles me why something as extreme as consistent bluescreens would appear all of a sudden.

Is there anything I can check or change about my system that would eliminate these bluescreens? Or at least make them not as frequent?

Specs on my laptop:
Windows 7 64-bit home premium
Intel Core 2 Duo T6600 2.2GHz
3 gigs of RAM
Mobile Intel 4 series express chipset family graphics card

I realize the specs are not fit for things like rendering video, but it worked perfectly rendering any .camrec I had recorded the same day the problems started. Any advice?

Also, sorry for the wall of text, hehe. Also sorry that any topic I seem to make anymore is just some tech question. I ask here because I know you guys know what you're talking about, and I trust your information.

If you check out the bsod code and post it here, then someone bsod savvy might help you more. But as for your youtube issue, play any video and right click on it. Go to settings, click the little icon that is first from the left and uncheck enable hardware acceleration. It helped me when I had issues with it. If you've already done that then I can't really help sorry.

It could be the cause. I have had similar problems (on XP though) with these onboard Intels just with running basic stuff. Wish I could give you more of a technical explanation but I'm mostly a self-taught "backyard mechanic" when it comes to PCs. Maybe it overheats and crashes to save the board (like with their CPUs on that Tom's Hardware video)?

Overheating? Check the temp in the bios after it crashes.

yeah, sounds like hardware stress failure, probably graphics chip or power supply.

Can it really be blamed on the graphics card if it was performing just fine without any problems up until this one video?

As far as overheating goes, the temp does get really hot, but I'm not sure how to remedy that? Would there be a way to get my computer to use less power to avoid reaching high temperatures?

Depends what's involved in this rendering process. Also, maybe the chip's on its way out. Constant heating and cooling wears things out (well they say that but I'm posting from a machine running a single-core Celeron CPU, lol)


Don't think so. If it was a tower with a video card I'd say just go and but a new Heatsink & Fan combo for it (there are some really cool ones available - bad joke) and add some case fans but with a laptop I dunno what to suggest.

Hmm, I think I've found a way to cap the processing power of my laptop. Went into power management and changed the max and minimum of the processors power when plugged up, and it keeps my computer pretty cool when rendering a trimmed down version of the same video.

I'll have a go at rendering the entire thing in a bit. Unfortunately, it feels like it's slowing down the rendering process quite a bit, but I don't really have much of a choice.

Heh, you fellas might see a "Suggestions for a new computer" thread pretty soon.

you've already posted it here.