m11xr2 blue screens... The Pain!

Greetings all,
I have an alienware m11x r2, and I have been getting a ridiculous amount of blue screens as of late. It can take 2 minutes of playing WoW to an hour of playing, but after a random amount of time, the game will stutter once and then immediately blue screen. The blue screen always references nvlddmkm.sys. WoW used to black screen, which was only solvable by ctrl-alt-delete. This would then cause the system to hang and prevent it from shutting down (barring the good old fashioned power button). I have rolled back drivers by uninstalling the current drivers, using driver sweeper in safe mode, and reinstalling different drivers. I have the battery set to High Performance and have whitelisted all games to run through the 335m. My system is not overheating- it is on a cooling pad, has good ventilation, and is treated with canned air regularly. I purchased this machine to be a work/casual gaming machine for when I am on the road, and I look forward to your support. Thanks!

 

What's weird is there is now a weird "annnhhh" noise occurring immediately before the blue screens... What is going on here?

 

any overclocking?

 

Nope... I have no idea what else to do!

 

How about reinstall Windows? If it doesn't solve the problem, return it to Dell.

 

Alright, before I say anything know that this fix worked for me and I have not verified it with anyone else so you might be the first.

I was having this problem quite a lot at any clocks. It started with the 270.61 drivers and continued no matter what I installed. Eventually I uninstalled, cleaned and reinstalled all in safe mode instead of installing in full boot up like I normally do. I also went to the 275.33 drivers. So far I have not had a problem again and I have re-overclocked my laptop.

From what I know of the problem unstable over clocks, bad drivers, and bad gpus can cause the problem. It seems that in the 270 drivers the computer started BSODing instead of having the video card drivers fail when unstable to prevent the needing of a hard restart.

However It also seems that UAC (User account control) has a bad affect on the drivers that are being installed and when in full boot can cause problems. I don't know how true this is as it is from an unverified source, but that seems to have been what happened to me.

Try uninstalling, cleaning and reinstalling (Clean with CCleaner or Driver sweeper) all in safe mode and run wow at stock clocks. See if you have any luck with that. If you do not then I would be looking for a system restore and a call to dell if that fails.

 

check your RAM, scan the HDD for errors.

 

I'm starting to get BSOD when I'm using connectify....geez

 

I was having a problem but with Warcraft 3 Frozen Throne. Same noise glitch, but my laptop would hard-reset after dumping the files (I have it set to do so though). I tried reinstalling several different drivers before finally resorting to reinstalling the game, and it ended up being the culprit.

Not saying it will fix your problem, but if your're looking to exhaust all options, I would reinstall the game after ruling out driver errors.

 

nvlddmkm.sys deals with having a GPU being overclocked too far. It was implemented in the 270 series of drivers. I had the same question. Your GPU may be faulty if you have not overclocked.

I recently posted the same question earlier: Here.

 

I played uninterrupted for about 2 hours last night after installing throttlestop and following the setup guide for the m11x that's on this site. It has been flawless as of late, so I'll keep my fingers crossed! I'll post an update in the near future. Thanks all for your suggestions and support thusfar!

 

So you're now overclocking your CPU, whereas you weren't when you had this problem start? That doesn't seem to be a likely "fix".

 

Well, it was the only thing I didn't try. Blue screened within 5 minutes of play today... Out of options, called Dell, was hung up on within 2 minutes of being on hold for over 35 minutes. Called back and left a voice mail... Argh! Do not want to reinstall windows, I've never done that before...

 

Nvidia's implementation of nvlddmkm.sys file was to keep your GPU from crashing when you overclock too much. If you didn't overclock its the hardware and a fresh install won't do it for you.

edit: It could also be that the nvlddmkm.sys file is corrupt but the odds of that are slim to none.
edit 2: it was implemented in the 270 series of drivers you might want to roll back to 260.99 or 267.76 and see if your game still crashes. If it doesn't then its the driver. if you do then its your hardware/overclock.

 

I don't use the newest drivers because of this. I can use certain clocks with the 260.99 drivers that pass all stability tests and never crash. With the same clocks with the newer drivers, I get the blue screen.

 

I was having pretty much the identical blue screen issues after switching over to the 275 drivers on my r2.

Pretty much the only thing that kept the system from BSOD every 10 minutes was downclocking the shader clock on the video card down to like 960.

I plan on sending the whole thing back shortly, still have full warranty.