Trouble with Area 51 m15x

Hi, new around here. I've had my Area 51 m15x for about 3 years now and have started to run into some problems with it. I'm not sure as to the exact nature of the cause so I've been doing some detective work to fix it, and would appreciate any input. I'm also not exactly great with computers though I guess you could say I know a little more than average? Anyway here goes...

Basically the problem I have seems to be related to graphic performance. I can't play HD videos as smoothly as I used to be able to, framerate in games isn't as good as it was, and when again when I watch streaming videos online in HD it stutters whereas it wouldn't have before.

Leading up to this point at around the start of summer, when I went home for a week (I live at school) my computer started crashing in the middle of games. First the sound would start to sort of crack and then the screen becomes checkered, sometimes with bits of the original image, and the sound would turn into a buzzing noise before the whole system shut down completely.

So from that I though maybe the problem was overheating, since it is about a good 10 degrees hotter back home than at school, and I did not have any occurrences before. On the other hand since I've had it for 3 years I've experienced multiple summers at home and it's never overheated before, so I've also considered that possibly the graphics card was just getting old and worn.

Anyway so now I'm back at school, and the crashing still persisted though with less frequency. Now I've started noticing the problem that I've described near the beginning, substantially lower framerates in games that I usually could run fin with settings maxed, and problems with HD video playback. I had updated my graphics drivers before then but I've since uninstalled the new one reinstalled the old one and the problem still persists.

So yeah, any input or speculation would be nice.

 

I've had mine for 3 years as well. I HIGHLY recommend taking it apart and cleaning out the dust and even reapplying thermal grease if you feel comfortable going that far. At the very least, make sure to clean out the dust from the fans (cpu and gpu) and from the heatsinks where they exit in the rear of the laptop.
I hadn't been monitoring my temps very much at the beginning of the summer and found that mine m15x was stuttering, crashing and generally doing much more poorly in graphics than normal. Instead making sure everything was ok under the hood, I scrounged for new drivers and kept on playing...until one day when I decided to check out my temps. Over 100C. I took it apart the next day and saw huuggee wads of dust that had killed my heat management as well as some overuse of thermal grease on alienware's part. The result? Blew a transistor in my card. Luckily, it still works. The bad thing is that the rest of the card's parts are now overloaded and generate insane amounts of heat (it climbs to 90C+ within a minute of opening any game). I now can only play games on low settings while the laptop is placed on top of a giant fan to ensure adequate cooling.

So yeah, clean it or it will catch on fire. Seriously.

 

If you have an 8800m GTX, then watch out. It should be dying on you pretty soon. So, take care of the vents and blow them out with a compressed air can.