Highly unreliable 15 r1, BSOD testing my patience!

Hi, I have nowhere else to ask for help:++

-recently I "upgraded" the pitty 5400rpm drive of my alienware to a 960gb SSD from SanDisk and the first month everything was smooth but the last couple of weeks my pc has become incredibly unreliable, I have been getting BSOD almost on a daily basis and its driving me nuts.

First of was a DRIVER_POWER_STATE failure, which I solved using holy google but I've been getting another error code which I can't figure out wtf it is, the error code is: 0x000001d8. I tried some "solutions" posted in Microsoft forums but none of them worked.

Another very recurrent problem I have been getting is that every 3, 4 o 5 times I turn my computer on, some files in folders won't load, sometimes those are some files and shortcuts on my desktop, some inside my documents folder. It just shows a progress bar and the legend "we're working on it" but the bar never completely loads so this makes my pc somewhat useless since sometimes I need some files on those folders. I also tried some suggested solutions for that but I still have the issue.

I brought up the ssd upgrade thing because it has been the only hardware change I have done to my system (of course I reinstalled W10), do you think the ssd is faulty?, should I format the drive and install everything again? or should I use system recovery?

 

Did you erase your original drive? If not, put that back in and see if the problems persist. If not, then I would RMA the SSD.

 

Hmm agreed... It might be the SSD is faulty..

 

This is like going to a doctor and saying: "I have pain in my abdomen, can you operate my stomach"!

There is something called S.M.A.R.T. on each drive.

 

Sandisk provides software for monitoring the ssd, i did all the tests and they say the ssd is fine, I had some problems with the driver of the killer network adapter before, could it be that?

 

I'm sure you know the obvious that the only way you will know for sure is to try a different drive.
Judging by your problems with folders, plus the BSOD, and errors I would say its the drive.
However I would say you really cannot tell by these symptoms as they also happen when other components fail.
Usually when I have ran into similar problems with systems it is usually one of 3 things. The hard drive, the motherboard, or the power supply...
Unfortunately I have seen systems exhibit these same issues and on different occasions it was different pieces of hardware.
I would save yourself some headache and just swap the drive to see if it still happens.
SMART is by no means perfect.
Guess we can just hope its not the motherboard.

 

Those SMART tests are mostly done for RMA purposes. Can you get a screenshot of the SMART values? Make sure all info is there (worst, value, data fields).

SMART is actually perfect. I have never seen a drive with healthy SMART values (not what manufacturer says it passes the test, that is for RMA purposes) fail and we do data recovery for friends and family.

While I agree with your hd, mb, psu (RAM first) advice, judging by the symptoms as you guessed, this is a case of a faulty drive. I bet he will find data part of CRC/DMA error field on this drive to be non-zero.

Best resolution as you and many others suggested is removing this and plugging in old drive. AW has diagnostics and that is pretty thorough. I'd run that from BIOS.

 

It is very rarely the manufacturer having issues with its drivers or chips. It is ALWAYS the PEOPLE who do not understand how Wifi works.

There are too many variables in a stable WIFI connection:

* Standards that evolve all the time
* Compatability between your Wifi chip and your router
* Make of your router
* Setup of your router
* Extensions activated on your router (like WDS, MMS, channel bonding)
* Interference from other electronics using the same channel in the same household
* Interference from your neighbors' Wifi signals
* Interference from your walls

Most of the time, you can alleviate these issues by changing the channel to a less-crowded one in your area. Again, see my doctor analogy above. You will need to run Netstumbler or something similar to see signal quality and make your adjustments.

Your issue is a drive issue. Not related to wireless.

 

Thing is, while that old drive is just as when I unplugged it more than a month ago, I found out that it had outdated drivers on it, I downloaded all the newest drivers available on dell's site for the new drive so I'm not quite sure if the comparison will be apples vs apples.

Another thing that might be worth mentioning is that for the last couple of days I've been getting BSOD with the error being KERNEL_SECURITY_CHECK_FAILURE instead of the previous one, right now I'm just lost, will change drives in the meantime and adjust/clean RAM.

 

Oh, BTW:

 

Drive looks fine. Run memtest86+ to check your RAM. Then run Alienware Diagnostics (you can get it when you press F12 while booting).

If all is well, then just plug in your old drive for a while and see if you will encounter issues.

 

Arghhh, this is embarassing but here it goes:

I found a guy on a forum suggesting that cleaning the registry via ccleaner and disabling all but the necessary apps that run at start might do the trick... And after fighting the windows explorer for the last time (because I wasn't even able to download anything because it won't allow either edge or chrome to open the explorer to locate the file) that solution worked... so far. Since then I have had my alienware on for about 10 hours straight browsing the web, netflixing, watching videos, doing some light 3d modeling, reading, playing games etc. Not a single blue screen of death or slowdowns.

"Mea Culpa" I know, Ccleaner is one of the things I install first on a new computer but haven't installed on the new ssd since the upgrade.

Final thoughts: install ccleaner on day 1 and keep your pc clean

 

I have seen SMART throw errors and a drive ran for literally years. (old friend's drive)
I have seen drives go wonky (not a complete failure) that did not have a single SMART error and the issue ended up being the drive was defective. A couple of times the drive was running with plenty of time for SMART to display something.
However there have been countless times that SMART has showed me the way of a failing drive and has helped me greatly.
I just meant that SMART, like anything in a PC is never going to 100% flawless and perfect.
There are just too many variables in technology to be perfect. Nothing in computing is perfect.

 

Nice, glad you figured it out. Let us know if it rears its ugly BSOD head again.

 

That is correct. SMART gives you indication of your drive's health. It is not an absolute and one should learn to read it and make proper use of it. Many SMART entries are one-off incidents. That is why you monitor it over time and see if problematic values degrade. I ran many drives as my main drives that had occasional SMART errors. Monitoring is the key. Best way to do this is to run a secure erase / zero fill after critical SMART errors (like UNCs, reallocation counts, bad sectors, etc) and see if there are any changes. If there are, throw the drive, very rarely you will be able to save it if it is going this path. If there are not, keep using but monitor.

I can guarantee you that this is not accurate or drive was not tested properly. Defective drive will either be DOA or if you do a zerofill (either directly or via SMART self-tests), its SMART values will show anomalies or it will just die (during test), or shortly after when drive is running its offline tests. SMART will NEVER be 100% healthy after a zerofill on defective drive because you will hit all sectors including the empty space on the drive that was not previously used. Your defective drive was not showing errors because not all sectors were written to. Of course we are not talking about outliers like an Intel X25M SSD that just stopped working... or a Crucial that had a firmware bug and became ready-only in 100-days of usage. In this incident, OPs drive was not dead.

We always do this on new mechanical drives: Get SMART values. Do a zerofill, do a SMART intensive test, Get SMART values. If nothing changes in SMART data, we know we can use this drive troublefree many years to come. Lemons get separated at this stage, they either die or start showing SMART errors. I have handled hundreds of drive. I have not seen a SINGLE drive fail after passing the burn-in tests and I have not seen a single faulty drive NOT exhibit issues with SMART after a zerofill.

Respectfully disagree. SMART is an invaluable tool once you learn how to use it. Machines are pretty much perfect, it is the humans that are not

 

You mentioned you reinstalled Windows 10. I don't understand why you need to run any PC cleaners on a new installation int eh first place. If you keep running useless software like this that can potentially mess up your system even on a clean install, I'd reckon you should be prepared to deal with never ending problems and your issues will most probably be software related -- not hardware.

 

A little off topic, but considering all the crap people were giving to this machine for being unreliable and flawed before I bought it (and still now), it's been holding up seriously good for me. Maybe I'm lucky, but I have absolutely no throttling under heavy use, fan noise is bad but not unbearable compared to other laptops and its actually never crashed since this summer. Just a faulty Intel HD Graphics drier that crashed every so often.

Anyways, glad you got it fixed. I feel bad for people who get these problems. Though I feel sometimes it's really not the machine's fault.

 

My experience but also that I have learned during my university courses. People tend to post their complaints and people that are happy with their products do not. I have been enjoying my Alienware 15 R1 since past summer as well and it has served me very well. The fan noise is something that comes with the territory of gaming laptops. Cant defy the laws of physics, small machines with high end parts need the airflow to cool down.

 

Well, yep, u were right, the problem is all over again, will try to repair windows, if that doesn't work I'll reinstall everything again, gotta work next week and can't have this mess, not so fun saturday...

 

So basically we learned to stop going to shady websites and downloading crap.