AW 17 r4 random windows freezes

Ok, guys, question:

I've been having a ton of ingame freezes with windows 10....and applied all humanly known fixes out there, all ram checks, sfc /scannow's , checked religiously for any and all updates, tried disabling weird stuff people say it worked for them in registries,etc.....and it STILL freezes randomly.

Ctrl-Alt-Del doesnt work, nothing works, only thing that DOES work is you still hear background sounds from the game...and...that's it. Hard reset time.

Any tips or tricks I may have missed using this pile of garbage called windows 10?

Unfortunately I am stuck using it instead of putting the ol' trusty Win 7 on it ...because intel 7 series 7700HQ is not "supported" by win 7. or so they say.
Any tips/tricks you guys recommend?

 

noone had win 10 issues?

 

We got a 2 17R3 here and 1 that does the same thing but can go for a couple of days straight without a problem but still can't work out what causes it but it did start happening after the win10 creator's update.

Edit: I am thinking of trying to get a latest win10 ISO with creators update and reinstalling

 

sounds like a driver issue, try unplug all usb devices (mouse, gamepad, usb headset, external hub, etc) and see if it still occurs. Worst case just backup your files, format and reinstall, often it is the quickest way.

 

Ill try to reinstall all the drivers...but it seems to be the creators update like you mentioned.

That is my main culprit right there....if it was a driver, or anything, i'd have logs at least.

But i dont because windows itself craps out.
So i dunno.ill see what i can do.
It's annoying as crap,that's for sure.

 

screw this.im gonna attempt installing win 7 on it.

 

Try Anniversary update.

 

well..so far so good....

I have just a few more issues left:

Intel HID driver isnt working on win 7 64 bit
and
EMSC.dll error.

All other drivers were installed with driverpack


Any ideas ?
Apart from these 2 drivers, win 7 works on alienware 17 r4.


(if you mod the iso with your usb 3 drivers, that is)

 

EMSC is Alienware OSD app. EMSC driver for w7 can be found under C:\Program Data\Win764, Install those inf.
Optionally, install latest microcode update for CPU http://forum.notebookreview.com/thr...s-broken-ht-on-laptops-pc-fix-is-here.806451/

 

yep, seems like the HID thing is making win 7 crash.

also, hyperthreading seems to be the cuplrit behind freezing....

i downloaded your microcode update from here, and ran it
http://forum.notebookreview.com/thr...er-threading-bug.806317/page-11#post-10564912

event viewer said it's updated. time to see if win 10 still freezes.

ps: did you try and see the new bios for the AW ? the one launched 21 july? worth installing?

 

After installing W10 you might wanna apply the microcode update once again.

 

oh, no, i mean, i have 2 different harddrives i swap.
sorry it sounded vague.

the original one, with win 10, and the swap one with win 7.
my whole reason to move back to win 7 was stability.


on another note:
bios update is regardless, and that is why i am curios if the new bios is any good.

 

Better ask @QuillP @MogRules @iunlock @Mobius 1 about BIOS performance.

 

For 17 R4 7820hk bios version 1.1.6 is stable. And 1.1.8 (1 week of test) too. My system never crashed with 1.1.8.

 

Thanks for confirming. BTW, the spoiler looks great.

 

yw @Vasudev. With both versions of bios, it is advisable to install the latest drivers that publish Dell

http://www.dell.com/support/home/us...t/alienware-17-laptop/drivers/advanced?rvps=y

Now I'm testing the latest nvidia drivers 384.94 ... so far so good. Improvement (just a little) my score in 3DMark ...

 

gotta admit, @QuillP that is some expensive hardware in that beast.

 

never is enough jejeje

 

Try GPU Caps viewer's OpenCL, OpenGL and Vulkan benchmarks to assess driver performance. Use default res. or max. resolution.

 

Never use Gpu caps viewer. I use heaven, furmark, 3dmark, Superposition or performancetest, etc... A little help. Which benchmark do you want me to run?

 

@QuillP
Under Vulkan run Geomechanical, Seascape. For OpenGL run Rain Forest and Rhodium, these OpenGL based benchmark are very GPU heavy so unstable OC will cause forced reboot. One more thing, exit RTSS/MSI Afterburner before running GPU caps viewer because you get awful FPS with RTSS.

 

After 10 min...

 

Try scaling down to FHD, you must see FPS above 1000.
Test everything at FHD, QHD and 4K.

 

resizing window or fullscreen?

 

Change in benchmark's window sizes.

 

I cant find that option... you say using command line?

 

When you hit Start Demo you will get a small window where you can adjust Window height and width and even Anti-aliasing.

 

The Graphics Amplifier is limited to x8 ... affects in the benchmark results...

 

Hey Vasudev, I also have the 6770hq and swear the niggling issues are to do with the HT bug.

I tried install.bat file it told me I needed to be administrator so I ran as administrator.

CMD box flashed so quick I don't know what happened. I tried to look into event viewer but I am not that experienced here and not sure what to look for to confirm the microcode was inserted.

Can you post a screen shot of the event viewer and where I should look ?

Thanks mate

 

Use HWINFO and Run it. You will see a summary page with uCu listed in CPU as BA. See this post for more details Skylake / Kaby Lake Hyper-threading bug

 

Sorry @QuillP, even I can't adjust screen resolution in GPU caps viewer. Looks like they removed it. So far, you can adjust only OpenCL benchmark's screen resolution.

 

Hey Vasudev

I got it to work by going about it the long way, VM Program and AMD + Intel downloads extracted run admin and got the process sucessful, BA in the uCu like you mentioned.

Not sure if the all inclusive zip file working on my system

Just need to fix the Micron mem bug on the 1070 and sohuld be all done. I dont mind a diy project but compared to my old 17x r3 the r4 has had so much more to do to it. Still great performace from it

 

Someone had the fix from the factory whilst buying new unit.

 

nope. bios update and microcode from vasudev didnt work. pc freezes completely still....randomly.

 

Disable all dell bloatwares and try again.

 

Ok...installed everything i needed....buuut....directX is dead. No DirectDraw,no AGP,no 3d acceleration......i installed win 7 64 bit,updated it, installled all missing drivers....installed dx12.....but it STILL says whenever i wanna launch a game "dx feature level 10 is required to run the engine"....and i tried installing all directX..
what am i missing?.

 

windows 7 is 99% operational. just gotta get the display driver to work with the system. or the system to detect that the card HAS directX . The drivers are,possibly,at fault. Ill try to switch to older/newer versions,see if that lets directX work on it.

Quick update....tried different versions of directx, seems i have no DirectDraw, no Direct3d acceleration, and no AGP texture acceleration.
tried a plethora of display drivers, the card works, is recognised....
also, in device manager, i have two issues:
ACPI\INT33D5
and
ACPI\CPL0004


HID event filter didnt work correctly after the first install attempt, and blue screened, so i had to roll it back.
sheesh, this is a tough cookie to crack.

 

and another update:

installed fresh win 8.1 pro, everything works....eeeexcept display drivers. installed 5 of them, both, when the driver is detected, make the display go black, until you go safe mode and uninstall them.

apart from that, 8.1 also works,and directx also seems to have no issue on the intel 630 driver or the microsoft basic driver.
this is getting frustrating as f*ck.

 

With or without the Microcode fix... Everything should work. Win7, 8.1 or 10 doesn't matter.

 

Sounds more like hardware issue, have you checked or TRIMmed your SSDs?

 

TRIM is on.

I think it's a fault in the windows 10 AW installs.
Formatted and reinstalled a win 10 pro i had, no freeze so far.

 

RAID or AHCI?

 

AHCI.

original win 10 that was shipped with the unit (had issues) was with RAID on.
changed to AHCI. still freezing.


after that, it was only AHCI. (win 7, 8.1, and win 10 enterprise right now that finally works flawlessly)

so my best bet is the win 10 home edition, with some of the alienware software , somehow screwed something .