Sound and youtube doesn't work

[The Monkey]

Every other day I have this problem that takes two forms:
1. No sound works
2. Youtube and other online vidoes doesn't play. They go for two seconds (without sound, of course), then stop, despite the fact the video is fully loaded. Vidoes on my hard drive work though (again, with no sound).

Rebooting the comp usually does the trick, but it's really annoying. It has started to appear more often recently.

 

[jimbo118]

do you get any error messages when loading windows?

 

[The Monkey]

No, the marker just stops moving two seconds in. In iTunes the marker doesn't move to begin with and in Windows Media Player, RealTime and Quick Time the marker moves but no sound comes out.

 

[mindless_moder]

sounds like it might be a memory problem , have you experienced similar problems while playing games ?.

 

[QuantumFireball]

You have all the latest updates for windows and the newest drivers for your sound and video card?

And like Moder said, is there no sound in ANYTHING? including games and music files?

 

[The Monkey]

You have all the latest updates for windows and the newest drivers for your sound and video card?

And like Moder said, is there no sound in ANYTHING? including games and music files?

I believe I have the latest drivers, yes.

And yes, the sound goes completely.

sounds like it might be a memory problem , have you experienced similar problems while playing games ?.

I don't play games very often, but I suppose the sound goes there too.

Can you expand on this "memory problem" theory, please?

 

[QuantumFireball]

Are you sure its not your speakers? If you're not, try plugging headphones in, if the sound still goes off, you know its not the speakers at least.

When the sound does cut out, check your sound options. Double click your speaker in the task manager in the notification area and go to Options>Advanced if you can, you might not by default if your sound is on-board. Check your options out before it happens and after, that will give you an idea of if its happening real time and if windows is seeing a device problem.

Also you could go to Start Menu>Control Panel>System>Hardware Tab>Device Manager and see if anything in that list has a ? or an X on it. Check before and after the issue and see if anything changes.

Is your sound on-board or from a PCI expansion card?

 

[mindless_moder]

Are you sure its not your speakers? If you're not, try plugging headphones in, if the sound still goes off, you know its not the speakers at least.

When the sound does cut out, check your sound options. Double click your speaker in the task manager in the notification area and go to Options>Advanced if you can, you might not by default if your sound is on-board. Check your options out before it happens and after, that will give you an idea of if its happening real time and if windows is seeing a device problem.

Also you could go to Start Menu>Control Panel>System>Hardware Tab>Device Manager and see if anything in that list has a ? or an X on it. Check before and after the issue and see if anything changes.

Is your sound on-board or from a PCI expansion card?

everything that he said ^ , the reason i think its a memory issue and not a driver issue is because the problem goes away after you reboot and clear your memory(clean boot). when you play games or view videos a lot of information is written to memory and then buffered ... or something like that , i'm not 100% sure about how it works.

 

[QuantumFireball]

Could be a memory issue a guess, do you have any other issues? Random Lockups, or slowdowns? or any kind of wierd errors lately? You can always do a check disk by opening 'My Computer', selecting your hard drive, right clicking on it, go to properties>Tools Tab and select check now, check both boxes and it will tell you it cant scan right now and asks if it can run on startup, click yes and reboot. Let that run for a bit.

And yeah it could be ram, what type do you have? Do you have mix and matched Brands or speeds?

 

[The Monkey]

Thanks for the help guys, it is much appreciated.

I have 512 mb RAM, not sure about the other stuff, though.

I thought it was a sound issue first too, but that doesn't explain the youtube problem, nor the fact that the marker doesn't move on iTunes.

The memory theory seems most plausible, any ideas how to fix it?

Another error that started to appear yesterday: every time I click "shut down" it reboots instead. After the reboot is works properly. This has happened four times already.

 

[CptStern]

here try this app for testing your ram:

http://www.memtest.org/

 

[QuantumFireball]

Ah, I have seen the shutdown-reboot issue before and it was an issue with the motherboard, had to get it replaced. Another time I have heard of a computer not shutting down was after an old 16 bit dos application was loaded. Sounds strange but there is an article out there from Microsoft about it. Loaded anything recently that might have caused an issue?

Maybe your PC is just be getting old, how old is it?

 

[The Monkey]

^ Four years, I think.

Thanks for the link, stern, I'll check it out later.

 

[QuantumFireball]

Yeah well without being there its hard to tell for sure, you could always back up your documents and stuff and reformat, just to make sure its not software related... other than that, its all I can think up atm.

Good luck.

 

[mindless_moder]

download a copy of ubuntu burn it to a cd and run it live , if you can watch movies on that then its software related if you cant then its driver/memory related.