pausing (not crashing) problems with XPS M1730

hello i have owned this dell XPS M1730 for over a year now, and it has always seemed to have this weird problem with graphical pauses.... the setup is a core 2 extreme edition 2.8 GHz proc with "dual 8800GTX" graphics cards offered from dell. the rest is pretty standard but if needed i can just slap on the long and mostly useless dxdiag list

now then, on to the problem. with certain games the game will play just fine at a high/good frame rate, but every so often the game will just freeze. sound will either not be effected, or also freeze with it, and naturally mouse movement I/O is also frozen. this usually lasts for about 2 seconds or so then everything resumes. originally i thought this was a graphical issue but one day i decided to look at the task manager after having it happen nearly every 30 seconds (although time and amount of pauses per time varies) the CPU usage would spike to 100 % from the normal 30 % or so. now originally i thought this was just the game having horrific coding issues but recently i got borderlands and it also has the same issue. i really am getting tired of the little "unknown nuances" of the 1730 and would like to fix these problems or know how to **** at dell tech support if possible lol.

anyway, please do post any ideas you may have as to the problem, and if you need any more information just ask and i will try to get it for ya.

 

Hmm this may not be the case, but I have a sempron 2200 (Yeah, it's old) and sometimes it would underclock itself resulting in a loss of performance. Though I'm not sure this can happen with newer models, procs or GPUs.

Try getting latest drivers, BIOS and then try again. If the problem persists it could be your GPU or CPU affected by heat. You have never re-installed the SO or give maintenance to your HDD?

 

i have reinstalled the OS several times. tried different OS (XP, vista(eww) windows 7) they all had the same problem. i have also installed the newest drivers numerous times but.... bios upgrade? that sounds a bit.... out of context? or rather out of place for this i would think?

 

Well, I mention the BIOS part because with the SXPS 16 some users reported a minor boost performance. Though don't know much about M1730, I'll try to look into M1730 BIOS updates. So, how are your temps while playing?

 

funny you would ask. normally they run around 60 but recently one of the fans stopped so i got to get a good look at the inside of my PC -.- blew all the crap out and removed pretty much every single bit of dust that was noticeable and now it runs around 60 C... still. but i have seen it run much hoter and not have issues. and i know others who have a very similar model that have had them peak at 100 C and still not turn show serious problems besides the possible failure if left that way for long periods of time.

so temp does not seem to be a problem, also the CPU runs about a stone cold 40 C or something like that (good for a fan cooled).

 

Yeah, you should check out that. I'm more inclined to say that the problem lies within the GPU. I think your mouse freezes in the game because the pointer could possibly be render by the game, so after the lag spike occurs you would see that the mouse moved around the game.

If it were a I/O problem then your mouse wouldn't move at all at some points. I somewhat doubt a dell tech can be of any help. Though you might try and see if he recomends a GPU swap or any other thing.

Some other factors could range from GPU drivers to certain S.O. characteristics such as desktop composition (win7 and vista) with older games

 

i think it freezes everything.... i don't remember my mouse ever "jumping" after the freeze. i will have to check again but i seemed to have fixed it by installing the newest driver. funny though though is i have installed new drivers before and it seemed to stop for a while but came back. so i think in reality i probably did not ever fix the problem, but rather the problem just happened to not happen around that short time after or something. who knows, i guess soon enough i will see if the problem comes back.

 

I'm having a similar sort of problem with my M1530, the game freezes, the screen goes blank, and then it resumes. However, my issue seems to be limited to when I'm using an external monitor and also after the game resumes everything runs a bit more choppy. I get a desktop notification saying the display driver has stopped responded and has recovered, but no matter what drivers I try I keep running into this problem that is only corrected by reinstalling drivers over and over each time it occurs. Thinking I'll finally have to take advantage of my warranty.

 

Well, I have the same problem on my Gateway FX... everytime I play a large game such as hunting 2008 or mass effect...the video would freeze and the sound will replay...or cause the computer to crash completely..where I can't even use control, alt, delete.... what I did was got my memory upgraded and change my page file.. to larger it seems to fix it. For the XPS...you can try running dell support center off desktop...which might do nothing or you can power the system off and turn it on by holding down FN then power to let the machine go into boot diagnostics mode...it'll run test to all of your GPU,CPU and memory.. try this at your own risk though...