Totally random lockups? :/

Hi everyone,

Im super happy about my few days old R2, but Ive had 3 times now without any logic that the entire computer just freezes. Locks up no keys, mouse or anything responds, only holding down power button to kill it.

It has happened both with and without any form of OC.

Does anyone have any idea what it can be? I dont get any errors, bluescreens or anything... it just sits where it is or whatever its doing and out of the blue, everything freezes up instantly.

please help if you can or have an idea... could it be memory that is not fitted correctly? it should give me a massive bluescreen though....

thanks

 

There could be a plenty of culprits...
You can try replacing the HDD and RAM.
Plus, look into the Event Viewer for errors.
Memtest could also help.
BTW, do you monitor temps?
That's for starters

 

I read up on some random threads on the general alienware forum and it looks like plenty of people across both m15x and m17x too have had massive freezes and lockups with a series of drivers!

And the fix that seemed to have worked for all of them was to disable Powermizer and the throttling of the gpu clocks.

So i have done that now and ill let you know if I have any random freezes again. thanks

 

here is the thread to the fix.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/gam...-disable-powermizer-win7-185-85-solution.html

 

Disabling Powermizer is not a solution as it forces the GPU to run @max clocks -> more stress on the fan and on the long run not perfectly healthy for the system.
But if it's a driver issue - you're lucky

 

Sounds like a cooling issue to me. SpeedFan is a good program to monitor temps.

 

I've got multiple systems running at my desk all the time with the same driver stack you guys have access to. I don't think it is the drivers. If OC is off, I'd recommend you boot to the diagnostics partition and run a full suite overnight to see if it finds any issues. Could be memory, processor, HDD, a corrupt software load, a third party application or driver you might have loaded, etc.

If you have multple sticks of memory, try pulling one out. My first guess would be RAM.

 

I agree disabling powermizer is not a permanent solution but it makes so sense to me. Memory seems odd too because that usually gives you are serious error.

@Erawneila
when you say boot to the diagnostics do you mean with F8 and windows7 or did you mean something in speedfan or like? thanks

Also I have no heavy load or anything, it has happened at idle or near all the times so heat seems really odd too.

 

Another strange example of what it sounds like is happening to me.

Windows 7 freezes randomly - Alienware Forum - Alienware Club - Dell Community

(EDIT) and another example, http://forum.notebookreview.com/alienware-m17x/430378-m17x-windows-7-random-freezes-7.html

anyone?

 

No, F12 and then diagnostics. You should have diags on your system.

 

Ah right, thanks ill try when i get home.

 

I've had a few of these on my r2, I seem to have gotten rid of them by dumping the intel sata drivers, I'm not sure my momentus XT likes them. I also shut off FF protection, since my issue seemed to hit when HD access occurred.

No lockups since going w/ vanilla w7 drivers after that. Obviously without the original drive I have no diagnostics, but memtest and furmark for hours can run fine, was just getting odd hard locks from time to time (maybe 4x total since I've had the machine).

 

@Popypopy

You are a smart person!! yes when thinking about it, at least two of my three lockups where while doing larger or smaller data tranfers.

Can the Sata drivers be uninstalled easily or what do I do take that step?
And sorry but what is the FF protection you are mentioning?

thanks mate

 

Just go into device manager and drive controllers or sata or whatever and remove everything that says intel anywhere in the name, let it remove the drivers. you'll be rebooting a few times, then it should install the generic drivers. Seems to have worked for me, though we may have seperate issues. I have a weird HDD and I think it was not getting along with this driver.

 

After random acceleratings, now TOYOTA random lockups? that's rich.

 

I had the freezing issue when moving large files when I first installed Win 7 on my desktop. That was a while ago, but I think this was how I fixed the issue. Could apply here...

You encounter problems when you move data over USB from a Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2-based computer that has an NVIDIA USB EHCI chipset and at least 4GB of RAM

 

sounds like a possible idea yes.. ill look into that! thanks

 

I'm going to bump up this thread because I seem to also be getting "totally random lockups" ):

thomaskc.dk, did you ever figure out what the problem was?

 

I am glad you bumped this thread. I was looking for one before starting my own. I am also having totally random hard lockups on my R2 system. Just like the OP described, total freeze... no blue screen or anything, just completely frozen. I am not overclocked and I am not even usually doing anything stressful when it occurs generally. It also seems to be happening more frequently. It has locked up on my twice so far this morning and it is driving me insane.

I have installed the latest drivers from Nvidia (258.96) and installed drivers for my Razer Orochi bluetooth mouse and Logitech G35 headphones. Outside of that, I have replaced the original hdd with a 500GB Hitachi drive (cloned original) before I ever booted the system. I did not have this problem right away, and I didn't pay too much attention to it at first, but now I am trying to monitor the system to see if I can figure it out. So far, I am not sure what to look at.

One thing I find odd is that my temps on the CPU cores are consistently 10 degrees different. The first core runs cooler than that second core. Normal usage and the first core is running 45 and second 56. Is that just bad heatsink placement? I am tempted to take it all apart and replace with MX-5.

Anyway, I would really like to hear what you all suggest on troubleshooting this issue. Maybe I should just call Dell and ask them to replace it?

EDIT - Now that I think about it, there may be a common factor. I have seen the lockups occur mostly while doing heavy hdd usage tasks. For instance, it has locked up frequently when downloading games from steam or other large downloads. How can I go about restoring stock Windows 7 sata drivers and remove the free fall protection stuff?

 

Run the full suite of diagnostics - F12 at boot. It might also help to selectively stress different subsystems on at a time in order to see if you can reproduce the lockup.

 

Try the link in my post on page 2 of this thread. It will help eliminate the file transfer/disk usage issue. See if that takes care of the freezing issues.

 

Thanks for the suggestion. However, I do not have the NVIDIA USB Enhanced Host Controller Interface (EHCI) drivers that the fix is applicable to. My chipset is Intel. I notice that the SATA drivers are Intel and I am considering removing those and trying the default Microsoft Windows 7 drivers to see if that helps.

A question that I have is when I installed the new hdd, Windows noticed it and told me that I needed to reboot to enable the free fall protection on the new drive. Is this part of the Intel driver? If not, how can this component be removed?

EDIT - Also, if some of you would please run CPUID HWMonitor and let me know what your two CPU core temps are, I would appreciate it. I want to know if mine are out of sorts with the 10 degree separation. Mine essentially idle at 41 for the first core and 51 for the second core. As they get warmer, the 10 degree separation remains in effect. Comparing to others would help me decide if I should try to do something about it.

 

The free fall sensor is usually tied to the hard drive. Alienware computers also have accelerometer software that could probably be removed, if necessary.

 

Just received my m11x R2, i7, 500Gb, BT, 4GB today and whilst downloading 15 applications (guestimate) from ninite and whilst updating Dell data protection I have had 2 separate freezes. Going to look through this thread and try some of the storage suggestions then report back.

 

I too have seen a few random hard locks on my m11x R2, hard locks on the desktop no BSOD or anything. The system was either just idling or copying files over the network, so it wasn't doing anything intensive. Haven't tried oc'ing yet either.

After reading through this thread, I just realized that one of the times it locked was when I had the notebook up on the side of my couch, so I think the locks are related to free fall protection. It never occurred to me that it would still be active, as I have a SSD installed.

I went ahead and disabled it both in Control Panel and in msconfig, we'll see if that does the trick.

 

I too was experiencing lockups when copying files via wifi. After many hours of troubleshooting I narrowed it down to Dell's most recent driver for the 1520 wifi card. I reverted back to the previous version (v.5.60.18.8, A02) released on 2/22/2010 and have yet to experience a lockup since.

 

I'll give that a try next if I still run into issues.

 

Well, disabling the FF didn't help resolve the lock-up. I reverted the wi-fi driver as suggested as well and still ran into the lockup. I'm stumped!

 

Since you said it happens without OC, then im thinking its the processor heating up faster than the fan cooling it. It happens to me, with OC on. never tried to open it to change the RAM.. I will try to run the diagnostics too, maybe it can work its magic.

 

So I left the system on all day while I was at work transferring a large amount of data across the network from another PC via wi-fi, but this time I had AlienFX disabled - no lockup! I had left it on overnight transferring as a test and it had locked up.

Might be connected, who knows. Will try again tonight.

 

Hmmm, so we could remove the AlienFX and use the "lite" app that is around someplace?

I have had no lockups in non-gaming use, only when gaming. But the outcome sounds very similar, no BSD just something hanging.. I can even access some apps but the machine won't fully shut down by itself.

 

Well, it wasn't AlienFX either. I rebooted to start my overnight file transfer test, and it locked up within an hour.

Rebooted and tried again, come back this morning and it's fine. I don't get it.

And yes, I went through the diagnostics tests and everything passed fine.

 

Update: I removed Alien bits, Microsoft Essentials, Intel HD bits, and anything else I could think of... no change for me.

After a long support call an testing games on the integrated GPU (not Nvidia) without any fails they will be changing my Nvidia GPU on Thursday (however that is done).

 

Also getting random lock-ups for three weeks now, have called called Alienware four or five times now and the technicians have done jacksquat, ran performance tests diagnostics benchmarks etc. all came out fine. It froze before AND after I did a clean install of Windows about two weeks ago. This is extremely frustrating, I called Alienware today and demanded a replacement, and the manager said he'd call me back. Hopefully this is the last time I'll have to call customer care.

 

I left my m11x ON the whole day.I closed the lid but I set up in the power options to "DO nothing"

I came this afternoon to check my alienware and I got a BSO. I don't know if it was because I unplug the power cable to move the laptop to my sofa. But this already happened before and I re-install the OS.Now it happens again.

I don't understand what is going on. The CPU is OC at 164 but it was the whole day doing nothing, just sitting there.

|Any advice? I don't thing it could be something related to hardware, I guess it could be software related, the diagnostics test passed(the short Version)

 

i have the same probblem, my cpu is no oc, i test the hardware (fn+on) all the night (full) and nothing happend, it still lockup, i was disabled the ieee 1394, the wwan and the bluetooth and wait if lockup or not.

 

My m11x has the firewire,wwan,bluetooth,and the battery chargint disable.

I'm trying to debug the minidump file and I will let you know guys.

 

it dosent work :|, i turned on the pc without the battery too .. doesnt work, i only surf on the web when it happended again.. sorry 4 my bad english

 

It could be the FF Protection that locks the computer or maybe could cause the BSO. I remember I have shaken the laptop a little bit.
I'll do more research

 

I have also gotten these random lockups. Upon restart, I always get this message -

"RTTSH.dll::AddTask failed with error code -2!" Do you get this as well?

 

Drop down the CPU OC and see what happens.

Last tab in BIOS, Restore Defaults. Save and exit. See if you still lockup.

Uninstall EVGA Precision and reset any overclocked clocks to default...
see: 1.9.5: RTTSH.dll:Add task failed with error code -2!

Once uninstalled, see if you still have an issue.

 

i reemplazed the wifi broadcom 1520 for intel 5300 and no lockups for now.., the free mini pcie dosent work... i iinserted the intel 5300 in the half pcie cuz dosent work on the free pcie..

P.D. it happenend again

 

for me the lockup was caused by Dell Intel graphics drivers, when the screen enter to sleep the screen freeze, sometimes you can see a black screen or a stuck screen. The solution is to install Intel video drivers from Intel site, not from Dell site.
It happened to me a lot of times when transfer a lot of info I left the notebook working and when back was stuck.

Hope it work for you too.

 

How exactly did you update the Intel drivers without breaking the nvidia ones and the ability to switch?

 

I downloaded the drivers from intel and installed, I didn't break anything I'm using OptimusTool, nvGpuStateViewer shows nvidia when I play videos from youtube on Chrome.

 

One of the first things I tried, no dice.

So I left the laptop on overnight with the wi-fi disabled, and no lock up. Gonna try again tonight, but I wonder if this might be what I've been running into.

 

you're right I have two problem, freeze random and freeze with the sleep of the screen. The second one was solved with Intel drivers but the first one I still don't know what's happening I checked Event Viewer, I check DPC Latency Monitor and it's fine.

I'm lost now.

 

mine is not intel hd driver, ill try fresh factory install

 

Just an update on this.. Motherboard changed by a nice support chap, and all working superb now.

 

this is normal?
temp room 25 *C


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