Video Stopped Running, Acts as if Permanently Paused (plus some other, possibly unrelated issues)

James_135

Reputable
Dec 4, 2015
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Hi everyone,

Today I've found that I can't play videos on my laptop. This applies online and offline, on every site and file format that I've found to play. It's as if the video is forever paused - if I go on YouTube, the video buffers and I can view every single frame that I want, but the play button does absolutely nothing. Offline, on both VLC and Windows Media Player the video either doesn't play at all or I see the first frame and nothing else happens.

On a potentially related note, a number of games and Steam have also stopped working. I've attempted to run Steam and a number of games and either the process runs but nothing ever happens, or it loads to a black screen. GOG Galaxy works fine, however.

I suspect it's an issue with the graphics card or drivers, but have no idea where to start in solving this. Recently I've been finding that all games were stuttering a lot and occasionally the graphics and audio crashed altogether, leaving a flickering image of the last few frames and a buzzing sound. Yesterday, I did a clean reinstall my Nvidia graphics drivers (the second time I'd done this but the first clean install) - and by that I mean I checked the "do a clean install" box - and everything appeared to work fine gaming-wise. Today, I start up my computer and the above issues are happening.

I've checked for all driver and Windows updates, and reinstalling again doesn't appear to be doing anything. Any idea what's going on, or even if the above issues are related?

Specs
I'm using an ASUS laptop (X552C) with the following specs:

  • Windows 8.1
    Intel i3-3217U (1.8GHz)
    6GB Ram
    NVidia Geforce 710M (also Intel HD 4000 integrated graphics)

Thanks