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When I watch videos with my Chrome browser (on Windows 7 Acer laptop), sometimes the video playback freezes and audio goes into "super slow motion" stuttering/buzzing mode and then go silent. This can last from a few seconds to a couple of minutes. The computer never responds while this is happening.

During this time Chrome is apparently reading data from disk at four bytes at a time instead of the normal hundreds and thousands of bytes. I can see crazy massive numbers of these four byte reads in succession in Process monitor (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896645) at the time of the freeze.

Some of the data looks like this:

ReadFile... C:\Users\something\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\Pepper Data\Shockwave Flash\9968.tmp ... Offset: 2 122, Length: 4

I learned that Chrome uses its own version of Flash player. I'm now trying to see if this only occurs in Chrome flash.

Meanwhile has anyone seen anything like this? Could this be a hard drive problem?

Edit: Turning off hardware acceleration from Adobe Flash Player Settings doesn't help.

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You need to ensure it's not a Chrome issue before being concerned about the hard drive IMO. If it was the hard drive, you'd probably (possibly) also experience restarts, noises and other issues, not just isolated to Chrome.

So, first off, test to see if the same issue occurs with FireFox or IE. If not, then it's probably not a hard drive issue, more of a Chrome issue. You'll then need to see if the issue only occurs when playing flash or if it always fails on any website.

It could be a graphics driver issue.

Either way, I suggest you run a SMART tool as it may indicate potential issues. Google for it, there are many free versions.

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  • Thanks! I'll be testing on Firefox first. This can take several days. I'll be back.
    – Kari Kääriäinen
    Commented Jan 23, 2014 at 9:29
  • Doesn't seem to be limited to anything, not Chrome, not Firefox, not Flash player. Got to do more testing.
    – Kari Kääriäinen
    Commented Feb 17, 2014 at 22:29
  • Please do try the SMART tool (and I suggest Acronis as it's free and very good). Did you update your graphics, audio and chipset driver from the manufacturer website (don't use Windows update)
    – Dave
    Commented Feb 18, 2014 at 8:19

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