Precision M4600 BSODs... Troubleshooting advice?

I recently purchased a Dell Precision M4600 laptop, and I really like it so far. I use it every couple of days to do work when away from my desk (I work at home as a software developer). The machine has been ultra-stable for this purpose.

Yesterday, for the first time I experienced a system crash in Win7. Two in a period of ten minutes, in fact. I was looking at the crash dumps later, and both are the kind that you look at and see no pattern. They're crashes in the NT kernel itself, dereferencing bad pointers into PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA exceptions. No obvious driver issue. After the second crash, I booted Win7 again, copied off my work, then rebooted the machine, plugged in an external flash drive, and ran memtest86+ 4.20.

Memtest just wouldn't run. Twice it hung at the blue intro page without displaying any numbers. I've never seen a machine do that before, unless something was seriously wrong.

I turned the machine off, plugged in the charger (battery was down to about 10%) and let it sit for a while. Then I re-ran memtest, which worked. No memory errors, no problems. Today I stressed the machine with hyper-pi until it ran down the battery. No issues. Memtest continues to run and pass.

I'm at a bit of a loss as to what might have happened... Bad memory? Overheating CPU? Bad motherboard dropping voltages with low battery...? It won't repro anymore, so I don't know what to change to prevent it from happening again. Should I talk to Dell, or would that just make things worse...?

Some system details:

- Intel 2720QM, Optimus enabled.
- Replaced Dell-provided drive with 240GB OCZ Agility 3.
- Installed Win7 x64 Ultimate from DVD.
- Replaced Dell-provided RAM with 16GB of aftermarket RAM, 4x4 modules of PC3-10600. Memtested overnight after installation, all seemed good. First 8GB have been running stable for 1.5 months, second 2GB for about a week. (Which makes me maybe suspect the second pair of SO-DIMMs...)

Any thoughts or suggestions on how to proceed would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance!

 

Sounds like the RAM.

Try pulling out all the dimms except one and run memtest.

Swap the dimms around to see if any dimm slots are malfunctioning.

Run system diagnostics and see if any hardware are malfunctioning.

If none of these work, time to call up dell and ask for a replacement.

 

Are both BIOS and Agility SSD firmware at the latest revision?

 

Memtest continues to pass without issues. Except when it doesn't run at all, which continues to occasionally happen. I also ran the extended Dell diagnostics, with no issues.

Both the BIOS and the Agility firmware are at the latest (A08 and 2.15, respectively).

My current plan is to RMA the RAM I recently added, and in the meantime see if I can reproduce the "memtest not starting" problem with just 2x4GB.

 

I spent some time yesterday fiddling with different RAM slots and different RAM. It turns out that I can reproduce the memtest86+ failure to start with both RAM kits and both pairs of slots. Which means that either it's a glitch in the program, or a motherboard issue.

But still no evidence that any of the memory is bad, in the standard bit-flipping sense.

I then switched over to memtest86 4.0a, which uses all four cores. After an overnight run, I get this:

http://mfeingol.almonaster.net/downloads/memtest/Memtest001.jpg

Anyone have any ideas what this might mean?

 

Think its time to call Dell and have them send u a new set of memory

If that fails, then it's new motherboard time IMO.

 

Dave:

Unfortunately this is all aftermarket memory. Do you think it's worth RMAing it first? I would have expected _some_ actual memtest errors if it were bad, and unfortunately I'm just not seeing any kind of pattern there.

 

You don't have the Dell Ram anymore ?

It's is strange that both sets are acting up.

It could be a problem on the main board, but dell will want to replace the dell supplied ram first.

at this point you may want to try to RMA one of the sets of ram and see if it helps.

I have seen some issues in the past which simply came down to some brands are just not compatible - try a different brand name if you can.

What are the brand names of the 2 sets you have now ?

 

No, unfortunately I sold the Dell memory because I wanted matching sets. :-\

The memory I have now is Patriot PSD38G1333SK.

 

You have a business warranty for a reason,

tell them what happens and also tell them that the dimms all pass memtest.

They should send you a new MB with a tech in the next 2 business days.