Is my M15x trying to tell me something....

Hi Everyone,

My just over a year old M15x has been exhibiting some strange behaviour over the past 5 months or so. I have been getting spontaneous re-boots. I would be surfing the web, or just doing something in e-mail, and the screen would go black. After about 30 seconds, the system would reboot. This has happend around 3 times since August. Plus, just lately, I am getting hard locks while playing games. The first time, the screen just froze. This morning, the screen turned pink. Both of these required me holding down the power button to restart.

Am I being paranoid, or are these all symptoms of a failing video card? Since the computer is rebooting, or locking, it tells me that it is somethign either hardware related (video card), or a kernel mode driver. From what I understand, in Windows 7, the video card primarily sits in user space, so in theory it shouldn't be able to crash the computer. Even still, I updated to the 260.99 drivers today to see if it makes a difference.

I have had 2 motherboard replacements (one due to the infamous A03 BIOS, and the second due to a bum board used to replace the first replacement), so I have had 2 people that have torn into my M15x. The first guy was clueless andn took over 4 hours, and barely seemed compotent. The second guy did it while I was at work, but so far (other than the problems listed above) it has been Ok. I saw the original guy do a terrible job of applying thermal paste to the GPU and the CPU, and I did not see what the second guy did.

Has anyone here gone through a bad video card in the M15x and seen these symptoms, or am I just being paranoid

Thanks!

Rich S.

 

These symptoms (especially the pink screen of death and the freezing) sounds like a video driver fail.

You should check the event log and try to confirm this. A couple of people with different GPUs have reported about this issue already, and as far as I know it was always a driver related problem.

For most people a clean install of a different driver solved the problem (ccleaner, driversweeper and safe mode)

 

Yea, it sounds like a video card/driver failure. Updating your driver should have fixed the problem, if the problem still persists let us know.

 

I get that same thing on my 5850. It does it when I use the generic drivers provided by AMD, but work just fine with the ones provided by dell which makes me sad as I don't think dell is going update those drivers anymore. Not really sure what to do about it because I want newer drivers but oh well.

 

Hi Everyone,

So it seems that the concensus is that this a driver issue. I was running on older nVidia provided driver, and just upgraded. Hopefully this solves my issue. I did extend my warranty, just in case....

Thanks!