“My DVD drive is not operating properly. It can play music CDs but when it plays DVDs the video and the sound are distorted.” It was my customer’s complaint about his Toshiba Satellite L25-S1215 laptop.
The following laptop troubleshooting steps helped me to fix the problem. The laptop booted to Windows pretty fast without any errors, with a normal hard drive sound and spinning CPU fan. I restarted the laptop couple times and didn’t notice anything abnormal. I tested the optical drive with a generic data CD and a DVD movie. The drive recognized the data CD and all files on it but refused to play the DVD correctly. The video and sound output from the DVD movie was choppy, skipping scenes. It looked like a defective DVD drive and I ordered a replacement from Toshiba under warranty. I was pretty sure that a new DVD drive will fix the problem, but it didn’t. After I replaced the DVD drive the same problem occurred right away. The laptop had 256MB memory installed and 64MB were reserved for the video memory. I blamed a lack of memory and installed an extra 512MB memory stick and it didn’t help either. My guess about a corrupted video driver was wrong too because after I downloaded and reinstalled the driver the DVD video still was distorted. In cased like this, when we are not sure what is causing the problem the software or the hardware, we always install a test hard drive and reload the original factory software. I installed a test HDD and reloaded Toshiba Satellite L25 restore CD. After that the problem with a distorted video and audio output was fixed and I was able to play the movie for 2 hours without errors. Most likely, the problem with playing DVD occurred because of corrupted software.
If you have a similar problem with your laptop, do not rush to replace the DVD drive. Backup the important data and run a restore CD, it might fix your problem.
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Toshiba Satellite M45 laptop freezes up after playing a DVD movie for about 30 minutes to an hour
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June 27th, 2009 at 11:30 pm
logicbrain,
At this point I cannot tell if you problem is software or hardware related.
Have you checked all sound settings? I belied if you reinstall the driver, it might keep the old settings
Have you tried using Windows system restore utility? Try restoring Windows back to the time when it had good sound.
June 24th, 2009 at 1:01 am
hi,
i have SATELLITE L10-194 note book.
i was playing flash games, suddenly sound distoted,
at that time i tink that it may be game problem, but
when i closed the game and played a movie, it was shoking,
the sound i am hearing is only surroundings sound and
main charactor sound is muted, (like karaoke), i also hear the music, amazing… my brain is getting blown, how is it possible?….
steps taken>>> sound drivers reinstalled—- result same
tried morethan two headphones- result same
finally recovered(withoriginal dvd) —- same
hint—– some videos & clips having 16bit or 64bit
audio are playing good sound…
Request— please help me… Thanks in advance.