BIG M4400 problem: full system lockup!

They felt it was a memory issue, so I switched out my G.Skills back to Dell's.

It worked for a couple of days (about a week or more), but I didn't really get to use the laptop at that week enough to encounter a freeze (used it about 15 minutes a day, the lock intervals can occur at randomly at bootup or half an hour into the startup).

Now, it recently started freezing again (noticed this yesterday while typing up a very long document on MS Word, thank god it autosaves). I need to contact Dell again, my motherboard was already replaced once for the faultly speakers (which supposedly was solved with the installation of the intel matrix manager, silly me) so I hope we dont have to replace the motherboard again.

But others are experiencing this too, which means it could be a [huge] bad batch of motherboards or something else we all have in common, the BIOS. Replacing the motherboard with another defective motherboard wont help, so it has to be a BIOS issue, Im shooting in the dark here though!

 

Unfortunately I may not be in much of a position to help with this soon, my boss has decided we will be returning the M4400s and getting M6400s instead. Since the wait time on the 6400s is about 20 days, I don't know if we're going to continue using the 4400s until then or not. I don't really want a 17 inch "laptop" but it's not my decision.

 

Chimera and I-RAM, what BIOS rev are you using? Have you tried the A06 BIOS?

David (from Dell)

 

I've gone from A03 (delivered) to A05 and A06, back down to A05 because A06 has the annoying "feature" of making the fan run on high constantly.

 

Well this is a little disconcerting. I have a m4400 that is "in Production" phase.
To cancel or not?

 

Of course, I always stay with the latest drivers/installations from Dell.com. This freezing occurred even before A06, way back. Please try to help us out here David, if you can. This problem is not an average freeze!

Up to you, it's not a little, its -very- disconcerting. You might get a perfect system, who knows.

But when it locks, it's shocking as hell cause it takes a second for you to realize everything you are doing is gone.

 

UPDATE:

I am doing some hell of a lot of amateur research to try and fix this. I have a question for the lockup people...by any chance would you guys be running NOD32 or ESET for your firewall or antivirus?

I think I'm on to something...

UPDATE 2:

Nevermind, uninstalled ESET/NOD32 and it still froze. DVD-Drive ejects though!

I read on another forum Vista 64 causes lock ups, who knows? I'll reformat the Vista 64 partition tomorrow to remove it and see what happens.

UPDATE 3:

Okay, I don't know if the ESET firewall was removed during uninstallation, but when I tried to reinstall ESET, it said firewall could not initialize. They said I have to completely wipe ESET off and redo installation for it to come back. So I did some cleanup with windows cleanup utility and found that I had to remove the firewall by going to local area connection properties and clicking uninstall on ESETs firewall. So I did registry cleanup, cclean, etc etc. Now I can reinstall, but since I know ESET is completely gone this time, I have not experienced lockups. Therefore, I won't reinstall ESET back on just yet. Let's see how this plays out...

 

No extra AV or Firewall software here. We were running Symantec Endpoint 11 but removed it when these problems started happening so we could eliminate any 3rd party issues.

Also, I can't believe this is a Vista 64 issue since I've been running it on my desktop for nearly a year now and never had a single freeze.

 

UPDATE 4:

3 hours since the ESET removal, no lockups.

UPDATE 5:

Removed ESET completely, 6 hours: experienced first lockup .

Back to square 1...last resort is remove Vista 64.

 

Couldn't it be a hardware issue after all?
But this thought really scares me...