M17x and Windows 7 random freezes

Have anyone really got rid of the lockups ? I have tried install Win 7 for a month but the lockups are a continuing nag. Weird, the lockups never happened under Win Vista 64 so i guess i've to go back to good old Vista since there seems to be no will or wish from Dell to solve this problem.

 

I get that once in a while, it's annoying.

 

What is that exactly ? is it the DPC Latency issue causing that ?

 

No, that is not caused by DPC Latency.

 

Oh, i see...no-one have identified the above annoying problem ?

 

Could be a direct result of the shoddy chipset in this gimped out mobo.

 

Most likely a conflict with W7. I have not had any lockups under Vista 64 and I do have the NV GPUs.

 

Yeah, i agree....i want mine replaced....

 

Thats good, i'm about to go back to Vista but i hate leaving things unaswered like on why these lockups occur.. I must add that Win 7 works fine without any lockups until a certain point of driver installation or application.. Last night i almost believed that i had it going but then the lockups occured during installing Office 2007

 

sorry to bump this thread... but i ran out of answers

been 3-4 months since my lockups started occurring only on windows 7 64 bit Home premium installed on my m17x and still going on strong.

I've installed new bios from A01, A02 and now A03, with the new Nvidia BETA drivers.... with no success. Now on average, I do hard resets on the lock ups 5-6 times a day, or about once on a good day, for the past 4 months since windows 7 was released from Dell.


The only solution is now to revert back to Vista, but then that's not the solution I would be happy about. I bought the m17x mainly because of the new windows 7.


I would appreciate it if some of the posters in this thread do a followup of their situation, and if anyone could share any new founded solution?

 

Did you have the Nividia storage driver installed? If so that would cause them.They do not work well with win 7

 

has anyone been able to isolate this problem? I have installed windows 3 times this past week and tried every single video/chipset driver and this is really pissing me off. I am almost about to throw this pos away.

 

I also have this problem.

I just contacted Dell's French technical support (in Morocco...just imagine the quality of service ^^'). All he was able to tell me is: "You need to do a complete restoration of your system, not only formatting. You have to delete the entire partition and reinstall Windows 7 (64x). Then we'll install all the recommended drivers...". I guess he never heard about this issue...or maybe he thinks I'm just a noob.

Anyway, what I tried is to install nForce 15.49 instead of the one given by Dell. It didn't solve the problem.

I also tried every nVidia GPU's driver I could find...same issue.

What I'll try is to install other versions of nForce, even for other chipset models.

Edit: I found this on the internet. They say it may come from a file named nvlddmkm.sys, from nVidia's GPU driver. I guess that's our problem because, as written in French, there are the issues encountered: screen "flashes", screen freezing and screen going black then returning to Windows.

 

I have made the following observations regarding this, and I am a self confessed noob.

With the Dell StorageDriver, I got lockups EVERY time I inserted a CD into the drive, along with random lock ups when using the computer. Now I get them when there is a CD being read in the drive, and I am multi tasking with something else.

I still get FPS drops lagging in some games, BF2, Crysis but I believe this is unrelated.

I have recently bumped up to A04 and I'm waiting for the first lock up...

 

I just went a whole day without a lock up after upgrading to A04... fixed maybe?

 

I have a latitude e6510 with nvidia nvs3100m and windows 7 ultimate x64. started having this 100% freeze randomly and clean installation did not fix. did anyone able to fix the issue???

 

It seems i have been running fine without any lockups with the VIDIA_NOTEBOOK-BETA-DRIVER-_P04_R264882 ( P04) version together with the A03 BIOS update

HOWEVER, feeling that I have fixed the issue, I went to upgrading to the P05 NVIDIA driver from the DELL website a while back. This brought back the random freezes on Windows 7.

So I reverted back to P04 and it has been working fine several weeks so far...

 

have the same issue, using the A03 bios, and the dell driver, never been right since i did a reinstall, so will be phoning again tomorrow to sort it all out yet again.

just annoying as i go away on work for long periods and can't do anything while away.

 

getting an alienware was the biggest mistake of my life...

I had an old acer ferrari 3200, it still managed to operate fine after 6 years of use, although the graphics and all are pretty much outdated. The only thing that managed to die down first was the keyboard, due to heavy and rough usage.

 

I've had random freezes once a day the past couple of days, similarly to the OP.
The mouse just stops moving, and nothing responds anymore, not even Num Lock, the Eject touch-button or a simple press on the Alienhead. I have to hold the head (power button) down until the PC turns off.

This was just during normal Win7 x64 use, not particularly stressful situations.
My system is a M17x R2, i7 QM820, dual ATI 5870 (CF), 4GB, A05 BIOS.

Most of the other posters mention Nvidia hardware - I have none of that. This could strengthen the theory about chipset driver problems.

 

I had those freezes on my M15x too.
One day, my system was dead, nothing worked anymore.
--> defect mainboard
I called dell and told them about my problem and ... wow ... The next they the technician arrived with a brand new mainboard.
Now my M15x works like a charm, no freezes anymore, everything's perfect!

... so my advise to you guys is: CALL DELL!!

 

It seems like an old topic for this issue... I also got this trouble after upgraded to Win7 from Vista on Jan 2010, then I have to uninstall NVIDIA storage driver(u can also use the system utility which from dell website to do this)...until now system works fine and never freeze again

 

I'm getting random freezes AND screen crashing (tearing and weird colors on the screen, and then poof black screen).

I installed the nVidia 257.21 drivers, New Command Center A06 and the new Bios A04.
I received one BSOD.

 

Does it do this when running on the integrated gpu or just the dedicated?

 

i seem to have this issue on my new m11x R2 :/ really really sad! it HAS to work stable or there is no point in having it.

Has anyone found any link between chipset driver or not? does it do anything having dell come out? thanks

 

Microsoft seems to have acknowledged that windows 7 had shipped with some rather interesting problems as shown in the link Microsoft details Windows 7 memory leaks, hangs, freezes
My guess would be that the freezes are the result of a memory leak as they are very common in languages with no automatic garbage collection such as c and c++ which is widely used in programming an operating system, for me they seem to happen at random, but more so when my rig is oced.

 

Unfortunately for us, this means that we're screwed until Microsoft or some third party programmers who are familiar with the windows operating systems release a fix.

 

Uhm.. that is really odd, Ive never had a single problem with win7 in that sense before. My LG P-300 core2 duo has run flawlessly for over 2 years now never had any kind problem running the exactly same software and nvidia drivers etc as the alienware m11x R2, with the exception of different chipset type / drivers and what ever else Dell has done...

 

Sounds like a GPU problem, probably from overheating(?), what temps are your gpu's at? Are they getting enough air flow?
You probably have done this already but I must ask, did you uninstall the previous video drivers before installing the new ones?

 

Had a couple of those until I installed Ultimate. Haven't had one since. I did an upgrade, not a clean install. So.....go figure.

 

@Pmassey

Good for you, really. But it still makes little sense unless there are some win-update going on too maybe? that said given it has anything to do with drivers to begin with...

 

Agreed. I also disabled the Firewire(1394). Who uses it much anyway, right? Had to do the same on my old 7805 bc it wouldn't come out of sleep. Maybe? I don't know.

 

Where disabling it? under device manager or in the Bios?

 

Device manager. Find it, right click, disable.

 

Just found this thread so wanted to add my story..

I purchased an Alienware M17X back in December 2009 right around Christmas time. From the day I received this laptop it has given me problems. I have made 7 calls to Dell Support about my issue, and am no closer to a resolution today as I was back in December. I have asked to speak with a supervisor during my last 3 calls, and all refused to allow me to talk to one.

My issue is that the laptop will just randomly freeze, and have to be forced into a hard reboot. It dosn't matter what I am doing at the time, gaming, web surfing, sitting on the desktop, etc. Sometimes it will work for 5 minutes and freeze up, sometimes it will freeze as soon as it loads windows, sometimes it will take 20 minutes, and sometimes it won't freeze at all, however this is rare.

I have changed the BIOS twice, re-installed Windows 7 twice, updated video card drivers, disabled/re-enabled Hybrid Graphics multiple times. Nothing makes a difference.

This is obviously a hardware issue. Ram/Video/Power/MOBO the issue is somewhere in these components.

Every time I call into support, they want me to do the same exact thing as the last person... I am tired of formatting and re-installing Windows, and I am damn tired of dealing with the very poor support. So far they have refused to warranty the system or replace it. I have filed a complaint with the FTC.

I am at a loss of what to do next, so I am resorting to writing letters and emails.

 

dude, its an uphill battle, I'll tell you that much, its an inherent problem with many m17x laptops. I am going through the motions with Alienware right now, but its not looking good. They seem to think the new NVidia driver will solve everything miracuously. I beg to differ, but we will see. Going through the 3rd OS install now.

 

Drivers did nothing for me. My system is not even SLI it is a single 260M with the Hybrid Graphics crap!

 

You just have to go through the motions with them on the phone. Get an incident number from the first call, do what they ask, let them swap out components etc...play their game...

 

Finally got them to agree to replace the motherboard. They will be sending a tech out. Not sure if this will solve the problem, but at least it is a start in the right direction, albeit 7 months later.

Will they replace it with an Intel Chipset mobo (R2) or will they use the same nvidia crap?

 

Any news since the mobo replacement dissident?

 

Tons...I was asked to start posting in this thread..

http://forum.notebookreview.com/alienware/449524-dell-alienware-aw-legacy-replacement-systems-warranty-repair-issues.html

But too make a long drawn out story as short as possible...

The tech didn't fix anything, Dell had me send the computer back to them....they replaced the video card and sent it right back to me still not working...Then they sent me an upgraded refurbished R1 with a bad MOBO that makes the screen have green static all over it. So now im at 2 R1s that don't function!

 

90% of the time its not the motherboard, techs just assume it is and always send it. I had a faulty 280m gpu at purchase, system operated fine in games but as soon as integrated/hybrid was turned off, every game was flickering horribly. Did you try Dells beta 197.84 driver regarding the freezing?

 

Yes, I tried 5 different drivers including the new release ones from NVIDIA. None of them effected the freezing or fps drops in any way in my original R1.

The replacement has an issue with the integrated 9400, which is causing the green static. They are sending someone out to replace the MOBO in that one.

 

I am also having similart issues now in A03 and A04. My system freezes suddenly and resumes like after 5 minutes or sometimes, it does need a hard boot. When Im on 280m SLI, I cannot watch any videos on media player or youtube, it goes green but the games play fine so to do regular stuff, I have to switch to integrated GPU. Any idea with the GPU issue ?

 

I disable adobe flash hardware acceleration in internet browser and all problems with freezing finish.

 

I think the same, seems to be not a hardware failure, i got those restart also yesterday when i was playing itunes and while had opened tweetdeck, which use adobe air, i started to worry about but i left the lap On all the night and did restart to see if this appear, but seems to be gone, hope this dont appear again . . .

 

Hi All,

My freezing/ crashing issues seem to be escalating. I'm going to try the adobe fix but I'm now having long boot and load times. Random freezing and shut downs.

I've updated all the latest drivers and run all the diagnostics I can think of. Seems my run of bad dell luck continues (former xps owner)

 

where is the option to diable the hardware acceleration in flash for IE? My m17x has been acting up as well, got to the point i rarely use the thing anymore and stick with my x201 for the majority of tasks.

 

Hi,

I can't tell you how 'happy' I am to have found this thread. I have had the exact same issue reported by many here for months now... Now I finally have some time/motivation to figure out the issue. It doesn't seem like anyone here has found thé solution to this problem (I see many suggestions, but nothing seems to work for everyone - maybe everyone has a different issue altogether that manifests in the same way).

My first thought would be a problem with the HDD, and indeed the Western Digital Data Lifeguard Diagnostics tool has found bad sectors but has failed to repair them. I contacted WD tech support, maybe they'll help me figure it out.

Some other stuff:
The video driver I am using (198.05) is one I found at LaptopVideo2Go (so not on the Dell site), but problems occurred before I installed that one so I think they're not the issue.

Also, I'm not sure which chipset driver you people suggest using?

 

For anyone interested I disabled hardware acceleration for adobe flash and (fingers crossed) I've had no freezing issues since.

So my recommendation to the 280m owners out there is update the driver and disable hardware acceleration!