So yesterday marks the 4th time this has happened so I now must get some other brains involved to sort this out. Every 3-4 weeks I must remove one stick of memory, boot Windows, shut down and re-install the stick I removed.
I received my 17R4 in early May, having pre-purchased
THIS KINGSTON KITtbased on information from
THIS POST on notebookreview. I also had a 960 Evo m.2 waiting and before the laptop's first poweron I had cloned it's internal HDD to the SDD and installed it as well as the Kingston kit. The laptop ran perfectly and spit out some impressive synthetic benchmarks.
The first time my problem occurred was mid-June. The previous day Windows had installed a few updates and I was greeted with a BSOD in the middle of web browsing. This triggered a BSOD loop of death that had probably 15-20 different errors show up over the course of troubleshooting.
Now I will elaborate a bit more in that I could eventually get Windows to load but it wasn't right. It felt sluggish as if 30 high memory background tasks were running, half of the start up programs like Tobii, Steam, AlienFx did not run on startup and would just instantly crash if you tried a manual launch. Firefox would quickly crash to an error reporting pop up which I later troubleshooted that it was occurring when Firefox crossed a 1Gb memory usage threshold. If I tried to shut down I would get the message a program was preventing shutdown and any further action would initiate a BSOD. I lazily chalked it up to Windows update being the cause and since I hadn't owned it very long it wasn't inconvenient to restore to factory settings.
3-4 Weeks later it happened again. This time I wanted to get Alienware/Dell support involved so the first thing that crossed my mind was to put the original HDD and memory back. I cloned my m.2 to the original HDD and reinstalled the factory ram. I powered on to the greeting my memory size had changed, asking me to continue or go into the bios and to my surprise Windows loaded just fine No matter how hard I tried through normal use or synthetic benchmarks I could not make a BSOD appear. Frustrated but still with the intent on ringing up Dell support I reinstalled the Samsung and Kingston kit and Windows loaded just fine as if nothing had ever happened. Again I tried desperately to create a BSOD and nothing.
Fast Forward 3 weeks and it happened again. Remembering the results of the last occurrence as well as when I looked up some of the stop codes they shared a common potential cause of memory read/write failure and the Firefox behavior I started troubleshooting seemingly being memory related I started there. The first thing I did was wait until I got a successful Windows boot and disabled fast boot. This had no effect so I then unplugged the power brick and let it BSOD loop until the battery was fully discharged. Again this had no effect. I then pulled a single stick of the Kingston and the laptop informed me that it's memory had changed and did I want to continue or go into the BIOS. Pressing continue put me into Windows as if nothing had ever happened and I'll go so far as to say the time from the Alienware logo to the last startup program launching was quicker than ever. The Steam login window was nearly waiting for me as I passed the login screen, something that doesn't happen with both sticks installed.
Yesterday was the 4th time this happened and using my experience from above the first thing I did was check to see if possibly a stick of memory had become partially unseated. Once I established it had not I removed a single stick and just like before everything was fine. I shut down, installed the 2nd stick and have been going about my business like it never had an issue.
I've tested the memory kit mulitple times with memtest86, even putting it in another machine to run the test. The only thing I can think of is this memory isn't fully compatible. I know the max speed supported is 2400 which is what the laptop runs this kit at but I'm wondering if it being over as well as the laptop being unable to read the XMP that it eventually causes an issue.
Thanks for the long read and for any tips you may have when this problem inevitably rears it's head again
Problems? See this thread at archive.org.
