Hello. I apologize in advance for the long post, but I'm at my wit's end here.

I'm using a Toshiba Satellite P205D that I got about six months ago. Several months ago it started randomly crashing, but always when I was watching some sort of streaming audio/video -e.g. YouTube, or SlingBox, or MetaCafe.

By 'crashing' I mean the following: the video stream would freeze, and the last half-second of sound would start to loop repeatedly. Then one of two things would happen: 50% of the time, the entire machine would just freeze up completely, and could only be fixed by holding down the power button and doing a hard reboot. The other 50% of the time, only the application (Firefox, for example) would freeze. I could quit the application but then would have no sound until I rebooted.

I have updated drivers - sound, video, anything I could think of. I did a system restore. The problem keeps happening. The last straw was when I installed Linux on another partition, and the problem happened in Linux.

This made me think it was a hardware issue, and probably the sound card. So I bought an external soundcard and disabled the onboard one. No luck - several minutes ago the machine froze up again.

Anybody have any ideas? I'll keep checking this thread if anybody has any ideas, and I'm sorry if this is in the wrong thread. Here's my info:

Windows Vista Home Premium
AMD chipset 32-bit
ATI Radeon x1200 graphics
RealTek soundcard

Am I possibly correct in thinking I got a crap motherboard?

Thanks, all.

Edit to the above: I forgot to mention that the problem now happens with any sound or video issue. I can't watch a DVD all the way through, using WMP or VLC player, without the machine crashing at least once, and iTunes crashed the machine for the first time the other day.

It may be a heat problem. Try blowing the dust off of the heat sinks with compressed air.