Alienware 17 (2013) Blackscreening HELP

My Alienware 17 (December, 2013), which was a replacement for a M17xR3, has now, after approximately 1.5 years without any issue whatsoever, started to randomly blackscreen with fans on high. All power lights remain on and my external monitor is still receiving a video signal from the laptop, as the monitor backlight remains on. I have to manually shut the power off to the laptop when this occurs, as it doesn't respond to anything. The Event Viewer doesn't show anything, only that it "unexpectedly shut down".

I thought maybe the issue could be the graphics driver (I have a 780M card), so I updated them, even though I haven't touched them in like a year, unless they suddenly became corrupt. Now I've stayed current with the graphics driver releases, but the problem still occurs.

The only thing that comes to mind that I've "done" around the time this started happening, is change the LED color of the power button, but I fail to see how that could be related, unless it's the motherboard. I've checked temps and everything is normal. The crashes (so far) only happen when the computer is idling. I've turned off all power-saving power options. So far the only common denominator is that Firefox (sandboxed using Sandboxie) is always running when the crashes happen, but that could just be a coincidence, since Firefox is pretty much always running when the computer is on.

I would reinstall Windows 7 if I didn't need it for work. Is there anything I can do to help narrow down the problem without having to mess with the hardware? My warranty is about to expire in a few months as well...

Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

 

If your warranty is still active, get them on the phone as soon as possible. No joke, and possibly extend it as well if you can.

 

Thank you for the reply and suggestion. How many years can the warranty be extended to? Right now I'm on a 4 year warranty. Can it be extended past the 4 years?

 

How much do you have left? I would call Dell first and ask them to fix everything.. Don't renew warranty yet.. If everything is fine, then there will be no need to do so and save the money..

 

Have you given the fans and 'radiators' a clean lately? always a good first step - you could also try removing the SoDimms and reseating them and as a last resort before invoking the 'Gnomes of Dell' if you know what you need to do maybe pop the CPU heatsink off, reseat the CPU and repaste.

I'm very wary of allowing a visiting tech to do anything after a very poor experience which ended up with a replacement machine.....

I had a couple of black screen episodes and did what I outline above, and no further issues.

Good Luck

Dave