Timeline freezes and play button won't work

Hi,

I have recently upgraded to a ROG Zephyrus Gu605cw laptop and installed the hard drive where I keep my project into my new laptop. I installed Premiere 26.2.2 (Build 3). My project opens up without any problem any everything works well for the first 5 minutes. But then the timeline starts freezing even at 1/2 mode and the Play button won’t work at all. I click on a different time stamp of the video or drag the timeline but the preview window isn’t updated. I keep seeing the same footage/image on the playback window. Play button won’t work. However, all other functions work just fine in the meanwhile other than this issue. On the other hand, when I try to close the program, it gets frozen too. The only way to exit the program is to force close it with Ctrl-Alt-Del.

Clearing cache, reinstalling the Premiere, shifting between different workspaces, changing resolution didn’t help. It’s not a RAM issue because all functions of the Premiere work well other than the playback issue. I also tried moving my project into another hard drive and got the same problem.

Anyone having this problem?

OS: Windows 11 Pro
GPU Driver: 32.0.15.7705 (RTX 5080 Laptop)