Blue Screen after reformat

I bought my M15x back in February of 2010. And for the first year or so it was THE dream machine.

But in the past 6 months I've had a reoccurring problem with my machine blue-screening for no apparent reason. I say this because I've head it happen when running in high performance while 3D sculpting, and balanced mode checking e.mail and listening to Winamp. So I don't know what causes this exactly because I can't duplicate the issue on command. It's just an unfriendly surprise that pops up once every week or two...yes, that frequent.

I thought a reformat would fix the issue but to no avail. I'm ready to take advantage of my warranty and have someone look at this machine in person. But before i do i thought I'd check here first. Managed to snap a phone-pic of the error mesage when this happened last night:



Any thoughts on a solution? I couldn't find a thread on here related to this specific error.

 

Have you tried removing the bottom panel and cleaning out the fans and vents? It could easily be overheating and crashing.

 

Download and run these two small utilities to analyze the crash dump files and get an identification of the files causing the crash. That will give you a better idea of the repair efforts required.

Blue screen of death (STOP error) information in dump files. (bottom of page)

Resplendence Software - WhoCrashed, automatic crash dump analyzer (follow Download link)

 

Runamonk - You might very well be a genius. I hadn't even thought to check the fans. I've had this beast for a year and never once thought to clean it :/

I opened her up and the left vents near the GPU were caked with dust on the inside. Took the fan out and removed a nice chunk by hand. Blew out the rest with keyboard cleaner.

I couldn't quite get to the right side (i believe that's where the CPU sits) Those screws were spring loaded and locked in place. So i shot some cleaner from the inside out and removed some visible dust that way. But i image the problem is a bad as the left vent was. There's just not an easy way to get to it without taking apart the whole system front to back.

Hopefully that takes care of it. Revelator if the problem continues I'll give that software a shot and see what it finds. Thanks guys. Keep you posted in the coming weeks.