Why does YouTube sometimes freeze my computer?

Factual Questions
1

Occasionally/often, when I click on a Youtube link, my computer completely freezes up. The mouse cursor won’t move, using either the touchpad or my USB mouse. Ctl-Shift-Esc won’t bring up the Windows task manager. Even the CapsLock and NumLock buttons don’t toggle the indicator light. Something is using CPU, since the fan starts running and I can detect the heat. The only option is to hold the power button to turn it off, and reboot.

I had blamed this on Firefox, but it does it under Chrome as well.

I’m running Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit, Service Pack 1, on a Lenovo ideapad laptop with 3GB of RAM. Processor is AMD Phenom II N660 Dual-core, 3.0 GHz.

Any ideas?

(The most recent freeze was when clicking on

from The Youtube Thread.)

(I also have Linux Mint dual booting on the laptop, but it has its own stability issues, and not just with YouTube.)

2

You could try to update Flash. It was happening on my Macs as well. I’d been blaming Lion, but since updating, no more killing my machine.

3

A couple of suggestions:

As Balthisar said, make sure you have the most recent version of flash. Even if you do, reload it.

If that doesn’t help things, try turning hardware acceleration off if it’s on, or on if it’s off. If turning off hardware acceleration fixes the problem, you might need to update your video driver or maybe even replace your video card.