Any Help Would Be Wonderful M17x crashing

Hi
I am guessing I have an M17x -r1 (has the QX9300 cpu x4). I bought this new from Dell in October/november 2010.
<upon further thought it was November I ordered it and December it arrived)

From day one I have had intermittant freezing problems. There is no systematic steps that I can pin point causing this. I have noticed though, that it does seem to be a tad warmer than usual when it crashes lately. And yet I don't think its always the case.

I can be doing what I'm doing right now...just typing away and it will hard freeze. If I walk away it stays that way and needs a hard reboot.

Other times, and more often than not, I am web surfing using IE, and the screen will start to greyscale flicker (solid grey flickering).

yet again I can be doing the same activity and the screen will freak out and go all green and start flickering.

I have had numerous occasions where the screen goes black...flickers..then comes back and windows "pops up" and says it has recovered from a driver error.

It was a lot worse before BIOS A07 (if you can believe it). I have tried the Dell recommended drivers and it does it no matter which graphics driver I use. I have the Nvidia 9300/GTX 280 combo.
I just installed the latest Nvidia driver (I got the inf from here, ty to whomever I got it from ), and it seemed to be doing ok...until a hard freeze yesterday. all I did was move the mouse on the screen and it froze. no browser open or anything...

I have had this thing refomatted twice with dell tech support online and it still does the same thing. Now that the warranty is up they of course are no longer willing to help. we've done all the tests and nothing has indicated anything is wrong. It does switch between integrated and hybrid alot cleaner and faster now with the latest 285 driver from nvidia, but obviously still freezes.

This issue has been going on for 2 yrs now and I read somewhere once that Dell had an issue with the sli link between the two cards (1 overheating and taking all the load with the other not).

I like this computer, Nothing says AWESOME like an ALIENWARE!
Any idea to fix this?

Thank you for reading.
Arcturas

 

Hello, arcturas, welcome to NBR.

Read post #32 in this thread:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/ali...nvidia-beta-drivers-290-53-a.html#post8192962

Follow all steps after properly uninstalling your current display drivers.
If you experience high temperatures, it's time to open the system, clean the heatsinks, fans and change thermal paste on your cards and CPU.

Just do a little search and you'll find a few guides along with useful info that will help you
http://forum.notebookreview.com/ali...ion-how-search-forum-read-before-posting.html

 

Hi and Thnks for the info.

I did actually see this post but didn't read it as I am unsure about using beta drivers considering I don't know the effect they'll have on my system. (think I tried a beta once back in the day and it ended up doing weird things to my system so nvr went that road again). But if you think this will help solve the issues with my system then I'll give it a try.

I kinda figured some of the 'recent' getting warm issues were dust related, but the crashing has been going on since day one..or since I had this thing delivered and I know that wasn't dust related. But ya I spose I should break it open and give her a cleaning..sigh..

I had actually resigned myself to start eliminating the ram by removing one stick then the other for a period of time to see if that the cause. fun fun fun!
thnks again...we'll give the beta drivers a shot..couldn't 'oit m8!
Arcturas

 

The key is turning off pci gen 2 off in bios, and doing a clean install of the nvidia driver. If you do this there's a good chance it will resolve your problems. If not it would suggest something a bit more serious.

 

Take a look at thug thread and do the same thing, change that thermal pad.

Wacdag, read my post above..

 

And whilst your re-pasting, clean the fans and the heatsinks, get the vacuum out, just stop the fans from spinning, there is a slight cance that a vacuum could cause them to over spin.

 

The fans can be taken appart too.

 

^ What he said.

i use a really really small flat screw driver and i'm able to open the fan case. This is the best way to clean them imho

 

I was browsing trough the forum but it looks like you have the same problem I have.
http://forum.notebookreview.com/alienware-m17x/637981-my-m17x-spacing-out.html#post8229362

This is dell's response maybe it helps you.

Hava

 

Well I have to say....THANKS!

I dnloaded the drivers and the inf, uninstalled the previous driver, rebooted, installed the new ones, rebooted, disabled the pci gen2 in bios, rebooted...and so far....nothing!!!

It's been a week now and I havn't seen any of the weird glitching, flickering, freezing stuff that happened before. Now I don't know specifically which one it was (drivers or the pci gen2 thing..probably both), but if it holds up like this then I'll gladly buy the next round!

If it was this simple then I have to say..wow. I shoulda come to you guys before (although if its the driver, then that just happened and ty to nvidia).

were still kinda holding our breath though...expecting the other shoe to fall..to coin a phrase. But in the interim, I installed BF3 the other day and have had 2 wonderful days of fragging with no concerns (except my F/R ).

So thank you all...now if I could just get someone to come over and clean my system for me...free beer!!

Arcturas

Hi
Yes I recall having this conversation with tech support, they 'suggested' that it is a flash related issue as most of the time the crashing occured while browsing; however, it would occasionally crash when just sitting idle and the mouse was moved...hard to isolate a particular cause when its so random and intermittent. the fact that most respondents happened to be surfing the web may be a red herring..hard to say.

And I don't know how flash works, but I have noticed the IE closes down more often now with a "problem" and restarts, but google chrome doesn't seem do to it and I assume chrome uses flash as well. Although to be fair, I use IE more than chrome..something that may change for the interim.

But like I posted above..so far after the new drivers and doing what was suggested I have had no 'weird' issues...knock on wood!
arcturas