Dell e6520 BSOD

Hello,

I've had my laptop for a couple of months and I have been receiving a large number of BSOD. We have a couple dozen of these in the company, and it seems hit or miss if people have them. Some do, some don't. We can't find a common software or hardware that is causing it.

Dell replaced my MB 3x, memory, HDD, then sent me a new laptop. I'm way past the point of thinking it's hardware. I've installed the latest BIOS (A05), and downoaded the latest drivers from Intel and nVidia that I can find on their sites.

Anyone have any ideas?

 

In same boat here.

Win7/64 bit e6520 with nVidia graphics.

Many BSOD, slightly improved by a repair install of the OS, but still a couple per day.

Was entirely reproducible by opening up chrome and playing back 4 or 5 videos at the same time: BSOD within 2 minutes.

Today, got pre-release A06 BIOS release from Dell local support (it may not be official yet).

Since updating, no BSOD, and did not reproduce using previous guaranteed method of 4 videos in parallel.

Too early to tell for sure, but go chase Dell for A06 ...

 

Errrr... did you try using a tool like RealTemp or HWMonitor to see what your CPU and GPU temperature was at?

I have not had a single BSoD on my E6420 yet. The fact that it happens after a few minutes when running video is something that raises a flag.

If it's GPU temps, there was something about thermal pads not making good contact (particularly if the heatsink was removed or the main board was replaced):
http://forum.notebookreview.com/del...64579-e6420-owners-thread-50.html#post7630987

 

It's not temperature. Dell also changed the motherboard (which is pretty much the Dell first level support equivalent of switching it off and back on again) when this was reported, and that didn't fix it.

For me it only happened when docked: undocked it was fine.

Probably specific to e6520 model, but the good news it that it does however seem that BIOS update A06 has fixed this issue. No BSOD since that update, despite trying pretty hard. None of the previous methods of crashing it cause problems now.

 

Sigh.

A06 BIOS is not the magic bullet.

Crashed again, BSOD. Curses.

 

Are you guys using the latest video driver from Nvidia or from Dell? Try the Nvidia driver and see if it makes a difference.

 

Currently I'm using the Dell one (since Dell 2nd or 3rd or whatever level support are trying to get to the bottom of this).

Prior to getting Dell support involved in the investigation I tried the latest Nvidia driver but it did not make the BSOD issue go away.

After a repair install of the OS and a BIOS update to A06, BSOD frequency has gone down from being able to do it at will, to happening once at random per ~day or day and a half of normal usage.

Usable, but annoying.

 

I only got BSODs on mine when trying to use i8kfan. Even after heavy tinkering and manually signing the driver, I still got BSOD trying to run the fan...

That's my experience...

 

How many of the people having the issue are on domains? I was in the docking station for 2 weeks but "not trusted" on the domain and I didn't have a single BSOD. Since going back on the domain I've had atleast one per day on the domain, and I'm not sure I've had any when not logged into the domain.

 

Uhhh, I started getting that on my E6420 the other day. Then I realized something -- I had disabled Optimus and it was running on the generic graphics driver (was wondering why it was draining my batteries so fast).

So yeah, check Device Manager and ensure it isn't an "unknown" VGA device. If it is, make sure you tell it to search for drivers so it finds the NVS 4200M. For some dumb reason it doesn't detect it when you load Windows.