"NOT RESPONDING" message whenever I start using my Windows Media Player

Question

I don't know what it is that causes this - if it's something to do with having the lesser expensive Hewlett-Packard computers, but this is the 2nd HP laptop I've had and the one thing I've had in common w/both of them is that, one, I got them for under $500 - about $445 or so, w/tax...anyway, I suppose that the more expensive HPs are better and wouldn't have petty problems like this - but anyway, - the last one I had & this one I currently have - the last one was a Windows 7 and this one is Windows 8, so the O/S has nothing to do w/my problem.  Anyway, it's like this:  every time I turn on the PC, then get it all revved up & ready to go, etc. when I turn on my Windows Media Player (WMP) the thing comes up on screen and it sometimes takes a few seconds, since I have about 740 CDs worth of music on here, but anyway, once the CDs show up on the WMP album page (where they're put up in alpha. order of LP name, as opposed to artist names, etc) - and so, when I go from the "A"s downward, just paging through it, looking for something to listen to, for instance, it ALWAYS, inevitably, without fail, gets stuck, sometimes sooner, sometimes later, but usually by the time I get to the Cs or  Ds, the thing gets stuck and freezes up on me and I can't do anything w/it. Then, when I try to click the mouse a couple times or whatever, I get a message at the top of the WMP box - on the top of the box it reads "Windows Media Player", like usual, but when it freezes up like this and it stays stuck for anywhere from 10 seconds up to a minute sometimes, the message that pops up right next to the "WMP" label on the blue border reads "NOT RESPONDING".  99% of the time, it just takes a little patience and sometimes just clicking the mouse buttons a few times and/or hitting a few keys on the keyboard (not hard, just randomly pressing down on some) - then it will finally come back & unfreeze and I'm usually able to continue browsing through my catalog, but there has been other times when it seems to be in worse shape - it'll read "NOT RESPONDING" for a while and no matter how much I click the left or right mouse buttons, tap the mouse on the pad, or whatever, it might come unstuck for a few seconds, then, I think I'm OK again, but sometimes, as soon as it looks unstuck, I can't get it to move at all and right away the "NOT RESPONDING" message comes right back up (and the page fades a little too) - in fact, lately, just before I did a refresh thing on my PC to try & get things to work better, it was giving me big trouble, it would just sit there, stuck, frozen up and nothing I did would unfreeze it.  I'd be frantically trying to unstick it, but no matter what I did, it'd still be frozen and when it does that, I can't get it to do anything.  Recently, when it would do this, sometimes, if I had not tried to get too far down in the alphabet, I can get a certain album open and get it to start playing, but the "NOT RESPONDING" message will pop up now and again, but the music will play all right, uninterrupted. 
Anyway, this is very annoying.  It's been happening for so long now, that I basically take it for granted that it's going to freeze up on me when I 1st bring it up.  I have no idea what's causing this to happen; like I said, this happened when I had a previous HP laptop that was working with Windows 7.
Kind of a long-winded way of putting this issue to anyone, but I just wanted to be clear and specific. 
Is there ANYONE out there who owns a cheapo HP? (not a Compaq, the computer co. HP bought for that purpose, to make their cheap computers and differentiate them from the HPs) - But I wonder, it's been so long since I've even checked -does Compaq even exist anymore as a separate entity from parent co. HP?  If not, then that explains why there's a difference between HP laptops that are $400 or so (at Best Buy) and the more slick, expensive HP laptops that have all the bells & whistles and usually run over $1000.  Of course, I'm not about to shell out twice as much money to buy an HP just to see if the more expensive ones don't behave the way their cheap models do.  I also had a Toshiba I bought about 3-4 years ago and I had even more problems with that - one instance was when the CD drive went out on me and I had to ship it in to HP (still under warranty, thank heavens) and they put a new drive in and shipped it back to me.  It also crashed one time, and got infected with a virus or two or three, which meant I had to re-set the computer back to the original factory settings and, not having an external hard-drive with which to back up all my music, pix, documents, etc (my music is the most important stuff on my computer to me), which meant that I had to go through this long hassle of replacing all the music I'd lost. I have a lot of my own hard copies of CDs, but there were so many more CDs that I didn't have copies of, so I had to visit the library over & over, checking out as many as 25-30 CDs at a time on a lucky day, when the library had a lot of the CDs I needed to replace in my WMP.  I don't want this to happen again, so I am going to get an external hardrive but I still don't know for sure if that would work. At least, by resetting the PC to factory settings I was able to get rid of the virus(es) that were screwing my computer up badly 
So - has anyone out there had any similar problems?  If so, I would appreciate any help or suggestions you may have as to how to deal with this sort of thing. 
Thanks a lot.  Hope to hear from one of you out there in the future. 
Have a nice 4th...
Kent M.

Answer 1

Hello kmanthie,
I just sent you a private message. If you are not sure how to check your forum messages, this post has instructions.
I worked on behalf of HP.