Freezes and BSOD, error 0x00000124

profdlp said:

...the VLC player is both A) Keeping your video card and driver busy at all times, and B) Preventing the laptop from entering a reduced power state...

tripleclick said:

Just came to my mind: On the other hand a failing fan would not explain - even contradict - the fact that the freezes do only occur if no video is playing or the other way round: Freezes never happen when a video is playing. And that would certainly be the time of highest expected/needed fan activity.

The blower fan for the heat and A/C in my 14 year old car will not run at all at the lowest speed setting. It sometimes works and sometimes doesn't at the second lowest setting. When I bump it up to high or very high it cranks along quite reliably. If I start the blower on "very high" and let it get spinning I can usually drop it down a bit and have it keep running. My guess is that it's gunked up and needs the extra juice to get itself going.

When your laptop throttles back it's power it also throttles back its fan(s). Maybe you're seeing the same effect.

Still shooting in the dark, I'm afraid. But to paraphrase Sherlock Holmes, after investigating the obvious you have to turn to the less-obvious.

Another thought which might help:

Look for a bootable Linux distro and try and run that. If you can go hours and hours without a freeze it's probably not a hardware problem. If it does freeze it doesn't automatically mean that it is a hardware problem, but it removes the Windows driver question from the equation. :)