Stability Issues with M15x

Hey guys

I've been having issues with my M15x recently. I bought it in august last year to take to uni with me (nom) and it has been serving me well for the most part, but there have been a few issues that are starting to worry me and are slowly getting worse -

1) Gaming can often cause a bluescreen on me - Starcraft (the original) causes a BSOD within about 10 minutes of gameplay, Diablo II has the same effect after about 20 minutes; in addition and more recently I've been getting bluescreens on games like Starcraft II - usually the bluescreen error is "A clock interrupt was not received on a secondary processor within the allocated time interval"

2) Videos - when I'm watching a video (.mkv or .avi, using DXVA in MPCHC), there are occasions where the laptop has locked up and I can only fix the problem with a hard reset

3) Games can sometimes be hideously slow (framerate wise) even when I'm hooked up to the mains. Investigation into GPU-Z during such occasions showed that the PCIe bus was operating at x1 instead of x16 2.0 (which it normally does) causing the huuuuge drop in framerate.

4) Sleep mode - sometimes when I put the laptop into sleep mode, it doesn't go into sleep, and subsequently bluescreens... I usually find out about it the following morning when my laptop loads into windows normally and then greets me with "Windows has recovered from an unexpected error"

Now granted, this hasn't happened often (as in every day sort of often) but these occasions are usually at least several times in a week, and as such it is leading me to be concerned, as my warranty expires in august and I don't want a dead laptop and no warranty; especially since it was quite expensive...

SPECS: i7-740QM, 4GB DDR3, ATI 5850, 500GB 7200RPM HDD, 1080p, 9-cell battery, Windows 7 Home Premium

EDIT: and yes, I have the AO9 bios, the problems were there both before and after the flash.

 

Hmm, this could have several causes, including malware/viruses.

First of all make a Throttlestop and a GPU-Z logfile while gaming (don't forget to check "continue refreshing this screen ..." in GPU-Z) and post it here.

 

I highly doubt it's malware (The university network itself has a scanner that can detect certain malware on people's computers and lock them out of internet access, I've seen this on some of my friends' laptops); plus I have MSE and run scans every day AND I tend to visit secure websites (none of them nasty seedy ones; not least because torrenting is blocked on our uni network anyways...). I'll try the logfile on GPU-Z and I'll try throttlestop too; but I do have my end of year exams next week so I won't be gaming huge amounts

Any chance that this could be a hardware problem? Given that it's been around for a while, especially the PCIE bug, I suspect that may be a possibility....

 

About 20-30min gameplay will be more than enough, it's more about the temps...

If you know that your temps are ok, then it's probably a problem software-wise. Do you have the latest drivers installed?

 

Its hard to say BSOD can be wide encompassing. if you have the desire i would reseat & repaste all of your pivitol hardware i.e CPU,GPU,Ram. Also on the software side run Ccleaner, it could be something as simple as a registry error that is causing this.

what kind of codec packs if any are you using and what kind of errors are you getting?
as for the possibility of Malware/ Virus,
Ive seen the most secure systems get them from simple things, you should never just assume that what security you have in place is enough,just do a scan with malware bytes or sophos, better be safe than sorry, running MSE is akin to taking a shower, you may be clean on the outside but stil be very, very dirty inside but do a few scans just be sure you don't have a root kit plotting around in your system, since your symptoms seem to point that way.



if after runnig ccleaner,some sort of virus check and you properly paste & re-seat your hardware, if you still have issues then re-install windows as that is the next step. this is likely what Dell will tell you to Do when you call anyway... If after this still no change,.. then its best to get dell involved ASAP since your warranty is running short.

 

I've just updated to the the newest 11.6 catalyst, and I've run CCleaner and Malwarebytes; I will try gaming a little later (Once I've done some more revision for exams, medical school is very unforgiving ) with the GPUZ and Throttlestop logfiles....

Edit - played a quick game of Killing Floor, GPU temps never got past 75, while CPU temps have not gone higher than 68-70. That seems reasonable, right?

 

definitely reasonable temps. i sort of overlooked this before but Im assuming the actual computer is clean? meaning, you clean the fans& heat sinks regularly for dust & what not?

 

Well, I check the vents regularly and they seem fine, but I've never opened up the system to check the interior of it (usually out of fear of me breaking something and voiding my warranty or worse..... )

Played another game of Starcraft II, temps have been reasonable, and no crashes, but I'll try to keep logs all the time so if encounter another crash I can be prepared for it....

 

Download Intel CPU Identification Utility and see if it marks your processor as overclocked. I searched around a bit and found other people with the same 'A clock interrupt was not received on a secondary processor within the allocated time interval', and their CPUs are overclocked.

 

No, that's still fine as well.

It seems I posted this at an awkward time; since my exams are next week, I've not really had time to do a huge amount of game testing, and thankfully my computer has not been crashing whilst I was on Microsoft Word reading over my essays...