Dell Studio XPS 16 - crashing intermittently

So my studio xps 16(40?) has just passed the 3 year mark and has recently started crashing.

There is a loud NRGGRHGHGHG kinda sound and the screen just freezes in place and my laptop requires a hard reset to function again.

The first few times I didnt take much notice but it has gotten to the point where this is happening multiple times a day, if i go to work leaving it open on the locked screen I can guarantee it will be frozen when i get back.

There are a couple of odd things, one time I was listening to music on iTunes and after the screen froze the track continued to play at severely reduced speed and very distored, this continued for several minutes. Also the touch buttons above the key board do light up if touched while the screen is frozen but there is no response other than the brief illumination.

I believed this was a memory issue so took it to my local pc repair shop, but they said it was a virus that was making the laptop look out of action while they had remote access. I was charged £100 to fix this issue, the freezing has however continued and they will not look at it again without another "consultation fee".

Just wondered if anyone else had experience with problems like this and could advise me better?

Thanks in advance

EDIT: ran tests on Hime's advice, getting error code 0F00:1332 in response

 

Where exactly is this "NRGGRHGHGHG" sound coming from? Have you considered that the hard drive may be going bad?

 

Reboot the laptop, hit F12 as soon as you see the Dell POST logo, and go to the diagnostics menu and run Dell's PBA.

 

the sound comes from the speakers, last about a second then stops.

There is sometimes a beep just before crash.

I ran the tests but nothing showed up

EDIT: re-ran tests and got error code 0F00:1332 HDD failure, quick google search sounds like im screwed. how come you guys can diagnose that with a forum post and the laptop repair guy cant....

 

I has an ASUS laptop with one of the infamous defective Nvidia 8600 GPUs. What you describe sounds similar to what I experienced whenever I tried to play a game on it. However, I haven't heard of this happening on the SXPS 164*.

Are you perhaps overheating? You could run a program that logs your CPU/GPU temps. After it crashes, open up the log and see what your temps were right before the crash.

 

I have an AMD graphics card, unsure which one, but crashing does not coincide with graphics load, it can happen openning tabs on chrome or while just on the desktop.

My laptop does run EXTREMELY hot, however I bought a cooling pad and again, crashing does not seem to coincide with elevated temperatures, either GPU or CPU

 

When you say "EXTREMELY hot", what temps are you talking about? Even if you're not overheating now, prolonged abnormally high temps over the 3 year life of the laptop might have permanently damaged the CPU or Motherboard.

 

I've seen 90 degree temperatures of the CPU, but there is no clogging evident in the vent and my laptop effectively lives on the cooling pad so i assumed this was just bad design and there was nothing more i could do about it

 

90C on occasion is high, but not extremely high, and shouldn't cause damage. 90C on a regular basis over a couple of years may.

Though I see that you found out you have HDD failure from the diagnostics, so replacing your HDD should be your first step. If your HDD is fried anyway, you might as well get a SSD. The increase in speed is significant. If after replacing your HDD your laptop still has issues, you can always move the SSD to the next laptop you get.