Western Digital shows up for about 5 minutes, then windows can't read

I have Windows 7 Ultimate

When I plug my WD External HD in, it pops up and works fine for about 5 or so minutes. Then it gets real sloppy and the videos on it start to skip as if i were streaming them off the internet. Then it shuts down completely and windows says that the external is there. I don't 'think it is a virus because I hooked it up to a buds laptop and he said it worked fine and he watched a movie on it. I don't know what the problem is.

I would say the drive is in trouble, hardware wise. I assume you've tried a different USB port, and it's still failing after a bit of warm-up use. The problem is obviously occurring repeatedly, so it's not a one-off situation.

Buy a new one. They're under $110 for a Verbatim 2TB USB 2.0/3.0 drive (which is actually a SamSung SATA drive in an external USB enclosure). I recently bought two, for two machines. I also spent $15 more for a Transcend internal PCIe USB3.0 expansion card to go with each new drive, to add two USB 3.0 ports to each of my machines, to truly get the maximum USB 3.0 performance from these drives. They've performed flawlessly.

Fingers crossed you can get all the data copied from your bad one to the new one, and then just toss the old one.

Don't spend a lot of time looking for software explanations. Sounds like a hardware issue, and I'd just replace it if it were me. I can't explain why it seems to work reliably on your friend's machine, but I honestly would not think it's your machine or Win7 that's at fault. Not when it degrades over a 5-minutes of use period.

How much RAM do you have in your PC? Is this problem strictly when playing videos? What software are you using to play the videos? What does your memory utilization look like when the drive shuts down? Have you tried different software?

For Windows to literally no longer see the drive, it has to have dropped off... hardware wise. Do you hear the "hardware removed" sound? Does the "safely remove hardware" icon in the system tray disappear as well, indicating you no longer have a removable drive connected?