Laptop can't play any video

[impmon2]

A while back AMD sent driver update which seems to have broken everything. After that update, any attempt to play video (AVI, MP4, NKV, etc) with MPC-HC, WMP, and VLC causes the program to crash right away. I can't even play DVD with WinDVD either, it just hangs and nothing gets played.

I have tried rolling back and it's already been rolled back 4 years worth and I still can't play any video or any DVD. I tried removing and reinstalling VLC, it still crashes. I've wiped the AMD driver(everything including CCC) and got the original version off HP web site.

So what else can I do? Mad at AMD for fouling up the video driver and somehow breaking my laptop so badly it can't do anything anymore. I am replacing this laptop in a few months so it can't cost anything right now, this laptop is about 3 years old and HP hadn't seen fit to issue proper updated video driver for built in AMD video in 4 years.

[aedipuss]

if it were me and i had to keep using it, i would wipe the hard drive and start fresh. if the hp has a recovery partition like most then it's fairly painless. back up your data and then re-install windows. the pita is all the updates that will be needed.

or you might be able to upgrade to w10 for free and see if that fixes it.

[DB83]

I may be wrong but....

If your video driver was so badly screwed then you could not use the laptop at all. My guess is that the issue is the DirectX/Direct Show API.

No idea if that can be repaired other than a OS re-install.

[davexnet]

If it all happened recently, perhaps System Restore?

[impmon2]

I can't run system restore. As soon as I open that, an error box pops up reporting explorer has stopped responding and needs to restart. I think somewhere a driver update or a system update got broke and corrupted something.

Going to go ahead and do Windows 10 and if that doesn't fix the problem, I should be able to download Windows 10 separately to wipe the hard drive. Fortunately I backup regularly so it's just a few files to copy over and I can shoot that broken down corrupted OS.

[davexnet]

If suspected file corruption, use this command from an elevated (ADMIN authority) command prompt :

SFC /SCANNOW