l502x freeze/lockup followed by beep

This is about the strangest thing that I've ever encountered with any computer...Every once in a great while, my XPS 15 here will freeze for about 5-10 seconds, then make a single beep and resume as if nothing happened. It's been doing this for a long time but it concerned me today enough to post because it froze and didn't recover (had to do a hard reboot). Has anyone else encountered this before? Just to be on the safe side, I backed up some important stuff and I'm running a full system virus scan (wow, didn't realize how much sh*t I have on my hard drive, the scan's taking forever! )

 

my laptop has this as well, is it problem? its only 1 second pause for me and a hnnnghhh pc beep kinda sound, when playing games.

 

It never happened to me before while playing games, but it'll happen when I'm just listening to music or browsing the web (oddly enough). It only happened to me about 3 or 4 times total since I got this laptop back in July of last year.

 

Next time it happens, check the system and application logs as soon as it's repsonsive again. Look for what was going on at the exact time of the freeze. There won't necessarily be something helpful there, but it can't hurt.

Windows Start button, right click Computer, click Manage from the context menu (or search for compmgmt.msc) to open the console.

Then System Tools | Event Viewer | Windows Logs in the navigation pane.

 

just happened a few times when playing pes2012, although i am using steam to download tf2 at the same time, possibly this is cause for the slight pause and beep

 

Hmm ok so I left my laptop on standby for about an hour or so, and I came back and it was powered completely off! I left it plugged in, and I don't have it hibernate or anything after so much time when plugged in...I booted it up and got the "Windows did not shut down successfully" boot selection screen...what the heck?!

Edit: What's up with the Kernel Power error?

 

Event ID 41 Kernel-Power usually just means Windows shut down unexpectedly, e.g. unplugging a PC when Windows is running.

You can check the System log to see if there's any indication of other errors.

The system log is in the Windows Logs branch in the nav pane in your screen shot. Look for entries flagged with a "!" in a red circle that have a time stamp around the time the issues are occuring.

 

I found this error around the time I ended up booting up my computer yesterday when I was expecting it to still be in sleep mode:

Log Name: System
Source: Microsoft-Windows-WER-SystemErrorReporting
Date: 1/24/2012 7:17:17 PM
Event ID: 1001
Task Category: None
Level: Error
Keywords: Classic
User: N/A
Computer: Josh-LAPTOP
Description:
The computer has rebooted from a bugcheck. The bugcheck was: 0x0000009f (0x0000000000000003, 0xfffffa8005f3aa00, 0xfffff80000b9c3d8, 0xfffffa800da3c5d0). A dump was saved in: C:\Windows\MEMORY.DMP. Report Id: 012412-19952-01.
Event Xml:
<Event xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/win/2004/08/events/event">
<System>
<Provider Name="Microsoft-Windows-WER-SystemErrorReporting" Guid='{ABCE23E7-DE45-4366-8631-84FA6C525952}' EventSourceName="BugCheck" />
<EventID Qualifiers="16384">1001</EventID>
<Version>0</Version>
<Level>2</Level>
<Task>0</Task>
<Opcode>0</Opcode>
<Keywords>0x80000000000000</Keywords>
<TimeCreated SystemTime="2012-01-25T00:17:17.000000000Z" />
<EventRecordID>88663</EventRecordID>
<Correlation />
<Execution Processid='0' Threadid='0' />
<Channel>System</Channel>
<Computer>Josh-LAPTOP</Computer>
<Security />
</System>
<EventData>
<Data Name="param1">0x0000009f (0x0000000000000003, 0xfffffa8005f3aa00, 0xfffff80000b9c3d8, 0xfffffa800da3c5d0)</Data>
<Data Name="param2">C:\Windows\MEMORY.DMP</Data>
<Data Name="param3">012412-19952-01</Data>
</EventData>
</Event>

Is that of any use? Seems like a generic bug report to me.

 

It'll take a little work, but you can get set up to get better info the NEXT time it crashes. There was a good article on solving W7 blue screens in the April Network World. You do need to download the debug symbols, but the article walks you through the process: How to solve Windows 7 crashes in minutes

It's possible you have a bad DIMM. If you have the Dell diags on your machine, you can use them to test memory. You should also be able to download the diag program from Dell.

I use memtest86+ at work. You download an ISO, create CD and boot from it, and it starts testing your RAM.

Alternately, if you have two dimms, take one out and see if the problem stops (you'll need to run without it for a while to be sure), then swap DIMMS and try the other one.

Dell will almost certainly want you to run their diag tool if you need to get a DIMM repaced under warranty.