I have a gateway m520xl. My problems are when i try to play music on it. It causes the computer to freeze for a bit. sometimes a minute or 2 and then its back to normal for a min or 2 then back to freezine. it only does that when i play music on the lappy. everything else is fine. also what is the max memory my lappy could hold? thanks in advance

You have 2 mem slots, 1 on the bottom and 1 under the keyboard @ 1gig each. As for the freezing, if it only happens while listening to music? maybe try a different music program, ie winamp. GL

tried different music programs, does it with any music program i use....also acording to gateways website the total memory my lappy can use is 1.2 gig on one part of thier site but says 1.7gig on other...i have 1 gig in it right now...

Gateway doent want you to be able to access the port under the keyboard I guess, But each memory slot is suppposed to support a 1 gig chp.
How is the sound in your other programs like games or movies? It might be driver related or even codec.

everything else is fine. no probs watching movies or nothing. i reformated the computer thinking that might help but still no go...

your music files, mp3? WMA? ogg? i cant imagine that your computer would be stalling due to performance bottleneck,

mp3....i find it weird that it does this also as it never did that for a very long time then all a sudden it started...

when running an mp3 file, the hard drive light stays on when im having the problem...could it be hard drive related?

just an update....send notebook back to gateway for the third time...even they cant figure out whats going on....they even replaced the hard drive and that didnt fix it...could this be a memory issue?

what is ur specs at the moment? still stock on system memory? u mentioned that u have 1gigo, is the open slot still available?
is the problem with any audio player?
music u played - is it file? cd? what with streaming music?

cheers ...

it has a 3.06Ghz p4 processor with 1 gig memory...no open slots...have tried removing one memory chip to test if it was a memory prob, and that didnt work....it does it with any audio file...does it with an mp3, or even with a cd...i have tried real player and winamp and windows media player and it still does the same thing

just for kicks, would u check and make sure that ur ide controller is on DMA on both 1st & 2nd-dary?

cheers ...

both are set on DMA...

i take it that u also have tried running memtest?
can u update ur audio driver? u might look into the 7510gx audio driver since its conexant audio driver is newer than that of the m520

cheers ...

do u have a link for the 7510gx audio driver? i did run memtest and it came up with no errors....i sent the notebook back to gateway and they supposidly fixed it for the 3rd time, but guess what, nope, still not fixed....3 times so far...i dont think i will EVER purchase another gateway product...u would figure that someone could figure this out at thier repair facility...ive sent a note each time telling them whats going on, but it seems they dont know how to read...the last time, all they did was a reformat, which i did myself before i sent the notebook back to them..