M17X R4 Unidentified Problem (Stuck, Speed and Performance Degrades)

Hi, I have been using my Alienware M17X R4 (9 months old) and out of the blue recently I have been experiencing strange problems. I want to list out the problems so that you guys can help me diagnose the problem.

1. After the laptop is ON for some time (average 90 minutes), it isn't able to read the hard disk properly. I mean, even the folder icons will not be loaded. In this situation playing videos or music takes a hell of a long time to start.

2. While playing music normally, after some time a strange sound is heard (like the sound we can hear while playing a scratched DVD in a DVD player, like something is stuck badly).

3. Gaming. After playing for some time, the performance and speed of my laptop decreases. It plays smoothly initially but then after some time strange artifacts develops. For this, I see there's a huge drop in the FPS using MSI Afterburner. The GPU temperature stays normal though.

4. Lastly, in these 9 months my laptop never hung. No matter what, it never hung. Over the past month though, it hung like around 8-9 times.

My Hardware Specs are as follows:
Alienware M17X R4
GTX 680M
8GB RAM
1TB HDD

Awaiting Help!

 

Guessing you can't get dell help in India?

What I would try is as soon as the problem shows restart the machine and press F12 at the bios screen, select hardware diagnostics and see if it finds anything.

Also; Get whocrashed to examine the crash logs and see what it thinks is the problem and get Latency mon and run that. This will check the interrupts, it does sound like something is hogging the machine badly. Ignore high 'hard page faults' as this will be elevated by any virus checking you have. DPC is the crucial one normally.

If this is the problem then it could be the nvidia driver, which one are you using?

Does sound like the GPU is failing but difficult to say, another thing to try is to just remove the GPU altogether. See if the problem with audio is still there and maybe do a bit of gaming on the iGPU (with low game settings)?

 

As far as getting Dell help, I'm not very sure about the guys as they couldn't even understand simple things such as FPS and such. This was the very reason I hesitated to buy Alienware. Still, I am going to try to do everything in my power to get it resolved. If not, the only option left is to approach them.

I tried the hardware diagnostics, everything is normal. Thing is each time I restart, all the problems simply vanishes. Everything is back to normal but after a while one after another they stack up. Weird.

My current driver is Nvidia 327.23. I am too thinking the same about my GPU.

Will attempting to remove the GPU or any such, kindle with my warranty?

 

No problem with removing (or replacing) parts yourself, dell still honor the waranty as long as you did not damage something AND you put original parts back..

The AW warranty is much better than the 'usual' dell. IMO it's much more like their business service with dedicated professionals for AW and on-site repairs if required. Check out the dell reps posts here, their sig has the information about replacing parts in it

I'd try a much older driver first, 314.22 just to remove an NV problem. All the drivers after this have had a lot of similar issues - although not over an extended period as yours is.

You can find the older driver here: LaptopVideo2Go: Drivers

The drivers are unmodified and for win 7 read win 8. When you run the download it will create a folder with all the driver files in. Go into that and run the setup.exe. Select advanced and clean install. Make sure you are not running any GPU or other hardware monitoring utilities like fraps, afterburner, or HWInfo.

If that fails then all I can think of is something is gradually dragging the machine down like a memory leak or something

I know you're going to hate this one but when windows goes into a spaz it is sometimes far easier in the long run to just give up on it and factory restore. AW support will probably advise this as a first step anyway with this strange issue. They do not go to this option anywhere near as often the 'cheap' support, knowing that people want to keep all their installed programs, but sometimes you have to bite the bullet

Good Luck

 

I have already prepped my gun for that bullet though. Still, I wanted to be sure if there could be anything which could have been done.

The only option I am left with is rolling back the driver to 314.22 and if that doesn't work "factory restore' it is.

I have one last thing to ask you MickyD1234, Do you think there could have been anything wrong with the Hard Disk?

Thanks,

 

Sorry about that option, but windows has been a flaky POS since XP. Vista introduced a new layer (HAL) to 'protect' hardware and ever since video driver authors have had to fight to get through it in a timely fashion. Win8 seems to have reintroduced these problem, this time it seems only NV are struggling, when Vista was released AMD had exactly the same TDR problems .

I think the HD is unlikely, you see a problem because everything is getting dragged down. I have had two HD failures with my previous R3 but both times the hardware diags found it and gave me a code to call in. Makes life easy on the call. Quote code, get new drive - and the code is unique to the machine so no way to cheat them into giving you a replacement, well no way I would publish

Fingers crossed!

 

This is how exactly my laptop looks now. It takes an year to load 'My Computer' but takes an instant to load paths using shortcuts. The problems I mentioned you previously is happening now.

I rolled back the driver to 314.22, still no use. Problem Persists. Am I left with that only option?
I still haven't run whocrashed and latencymon. Should I run those software now or should I perform hardware diagnostics?

 

Not got a good feeling about this. I have something similar and know a win re-install is needed. Mine loads fast but takes an age displaying shortcut icons . Tried a bunch of stuff but got bored with trying to fix a problem that doesn't really cause me any issues.

Anyway, I'd still check out both programs just in case something unusual shows up.

Hardware diags is always a good idea but once it says 'no problem' then you are not likely to see it change; you did run it after the machine had warmed up and the problem was occurring?

 

Well, that's frightening. Won't factory restore settle the problem, even if one has to make up for factory restore? What I thought was that there may be some delay in the read speed of the hard disk thereby causing the programs to load slower. At this point, while gaming, I get the lowest FPS and also huge artifacts.

I will try the software and let you know. Yes, I ran the hardware diagnostic after it was warmed up.
BTW Have you seen this problem before? Just wondering.

 

Yes, sorry a factory restore is far better than some hardware issue, I just hate it as a piece of advice when a problem might be solved if someone knows an exact fix. It will eliminate windows as a cause whatever the outcome.

The way I am seeing it is something is gradually taking up all the machine's resources (try looking in Task manager at the processes and see if anything is hitting they system hard). The artifacts are more strange though. I've never seen a GPU drag a whole machine down slowly, just artifacting and BSOD's when they are failing.

Taking out the GPU will show if it is specific to that as the speed of everything else should be good

 

the only mechanical moving parts are the cpu fan, gpu fan, & hard disk drive... these are the only components that would be able to make the sound you've described.. restores and driver update/rollbacks will most likely not resolve anything.. call dell.. goodluck!

 

I would recommend a factory restore or a Windows Clean Install. It does seem like a HD issue to me. Do you have any other hard drives to test?

 

Before a factory restore try step three in this guide.
http://forum.notebookreview.com/not...your-system-running-like-new.html#post9396290

 

I had been in contact with AlienwareTech via Twitter. I was asked to run a benchmark 'HDTunePro' and I posted back the results to them. They say that my hard drive needs a replacement. Also that this problem wouldn't be detected in 'Hardware Diagnostics' as the hard drive is working but not performing well. This is the result I posted back.
View attachment 104598

 

I had been in contact with AlienwareTech via Twitter. I was asked to run a benchmark 'HDTunePro' and I posted back the results to them. They say that my hard drive needs a replacement. Also that this problem wouldn't be detected in 'Hardware Diagnostics' as the hard drive is working but not performing well. This is the result I posted back.

 

That is very likely as well. The HDD in my M17x (R1) is 5 years old, and hangs all the time, and for several minutes at a time before actually functioning properly. Honestly ditch the HDD and fork out the extra cash for SSD, best decision i made on my R4 purchase.

 

In my opinion, the support guys are quite convinced that it needs a replacement. After I get that replacement I'm going to get a SSD for caching this 1TB HDD. That will, all this slow lag issues will be gone and those programs which I use the most and need the most will be readily available to me. This HDD is the only place I made a wrong decision and I swear, It will never happen again! That much frustrated I am.

 

So, after long conversations with the Dell Support and tests after tests, finally my HDD has been replaced. After which, I haven't seen the issue ever since. I must say, this whole process gave me a very huge pain with several loss of data.

Thank you guys for all the support and making this a better place than any.