Dell XPS 15 9550 Laptop freezes when bumped

My laptop works fine 99% of the time. However, if I'm moving it around, I have to be super careful because if I place it down with anything but the lightest touch, the screen will go black, it will freeze, and I will have to restart it. I don't think this was the case when I initially got it. I'm going to be taking the bottom off tonight and looking for anything that is loose. I was wondering if this is the case with anyone else's laptop (like maybe they are just built this way).

 

I don't have that problem.

This is a long shot but the screen cable that connects near the battery on my laptop works itself loose easily if the cable is touched. I found removing / inserting it a few times helped.

That is located under a silver covered metal cover with a special black JIS phillips screwhead which strips easily if you have the wrong screwdriver.

Also check the battery cable just incase.

And the RAM tends to work itself loose so reseat that.

Finally, you might check that your SSD-HD are properly seated.

 

Thank you for the suggestions!

I will check all of those tonight/tomorrow and report back. I'm hoping it's something simple like the ram coming unseated, but I'm glad to hear this is not supposed to be like this. I'm worried about sending my laptop in, after reading the horror story about the guy getting a new motherboard which now is causing his laptop all kinds of problems. So I am willing to take the bottom and and snoop around; hopefully it'll be an easy solution.

 

Ram shouldn't (but may) cause a black screen, it sounds like something's loose causing a short. While you are inside add the wifi antenna to the list as they are hidden under a metal cover as well but pressings got you covered on the rest. Reseat anything else removable but be really really careful with the ribbon cable clips, they lift up and are fragile so a finger nail of dedicated very thin pry tool and NEVER a screwdriver

 

Thank you for both of your answers! So I took the back cover off, which was actually good because I saw that the fans were full of fuzz, even though I don't have a cat/dog and I never use it on the carpet. So I cleaned that out, looked around a bit, then reseated the ram and m.2. Then I went to turn it on and the front light would flash 2 orange, 4 white, and the laptop would not boot. I literally didn't touch anything but reseat the ram and ssd, so I was pretty mad haha. Anyway, I had to reseat them both several times and eventually the laptop did boot normally. I noticed that while when I first opened the laptop, both had part of their gold connections visible, however, now that I reseated them and the laptop is working again, the gold connections on both the m.2 and ram are like 99% hidden. I think this has fixed my laptop and it comes down to the fact that yes the ram and m.2 connections are finicky and allow for too much movement. Hopefully this helps someone.

 

The Dell diagnostic codes for the "equivalent" Dell professional model follow. This was just posted a month ago:

http://www.dell.com/support/article/us/en/19/SLN295101#2016_to_Present

Clicking on the "Power LED blinking amber" title, 4 amber blinks was related to reseating RAM or failed RAM

 

Yeah you really should watch video's of laptop ram and pci-e drives being fitted as you need to hold them at a 45(ish) degree angle and physically seat them all the way then keeping pressure on push them flat, no resistance should be felt as you lay them down apart from where the ram clicks into the retainer, the ram has 2 notches to line up so it should be hard to get it wrong, of course the 1st few times it is natural to air on the side of caution and not seat far enough in case you break it

I often ask the customer to go make me a cuppa at that stage!