G72gx freezing with heavy sound distortion

[piemaster314]

Hey guys, I've had this laptop since Jan. 2009 and this issue has actually come up a few times before. I've never been able to fix it but it usually ends up going away randomly for some reason only to return months later.

When it happens the screen freezes completely and whatever sound is playing continues to play but extremely slowed down and highly distorted. Sometimes the audio distortion is so bad that I can't even make out the audio it just sounds like a jumbled cacophony of noise. Sometimes after 3-10 mins it'll unfreeze and go back to normal only to happen again anywhere from 2 mins later to 30 mins later. Other times I have to hard reset the computer. I'd liken the whole process to the computer having a stroke for a while and then recovering.

One thing I've noticed is it only happens when sound is playing. Mostly it happens while watching youtube videos, but sometimes it'll happen while watching Netflix, listening to Spotify, or playing League of Legends.

I uninstalled the Creative/Audigy drivers years ago because I know those caused problems, now I just have the Audiotek ones. I even tried uninstalling those but nothing seems to help.

[brecker]

This is a wild guess, but your hard drive might be the reason if you got an hybrid hard drive (it probably came with the machine)

Hybrid hard drive users experienced random freezes from time to time, specially old hybrid drives. It could be a firmware issue, or the solid cache of the drive might be wearing off. You could try to upgrade the firmware or to disable the nand flash completely to see if it fixes it.

Also I think your notebook has 2 hdd slots, if this is the issue, adding a second one or an ssd and booting the os from there it will solve it as well.

I can't think of another issue that might be causing "strokes", but that doesn't guarantee there isn't one. The tough part is that you will not know for sure for a long time if the issue was fixed since it only happens randomly 😛

You should google: seagate hybrid freezing

And read the experiences of other users to see if your strokes are similar to their freezing. Hopefully you will find the root of your problem. Finding out your exact model of your hard drive and google the issues it may have might be helpful as well...

When I experienced freezes I just waited a bit and added an ssd to the machine and I just used the seagate drive for media and temp file storage. I never upgraded its firmware or disabled the nand flash. If you are going to do this make backups or research if there are any risk associated with it.

[Pitcher1]

how is install asus release driver? or you can try install new driver from creative driver.