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nickolaughagus

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Aug 14, 2014
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Hello everyone,

I am having an issue with my Alienware M17X R3, it's been happening for a while now, so I'm not sure what it is really. When I am putting the computer to medium load, a few powerpoints open, chrome is open, and I'm streaming music, The computer will freeze completely for anywhere from 2 seconds to 8 seconds, and it just plays this static-y dry sound through my headphones. I think the sound plays regardless of whether I have music on. After the freeze, the computer will resume completely as if nothing has happened. This has been happening for like a year now, but tonight I just noticed it has happened like once per hour. I just got my motherboard and Nvidia graphics card "repaired or replaced" because they both fried on me a month ago, and this is the first night I have had the computer back.

Basically, would you attribute that to hardware, or maybe just a glitch in the software? I can reinstall windows if its just software.

EDIT: It just happened twice in the past 15 minutes now. It is not making a sound either, I guess since I am not playing anything. Ill check out HDD Sentinel, however I do have a solid state drive from samsung as my main HDD

Thanks!
Nick
 
Solution
Ra_V_en
My bad didn't notice its SSD only unit, still that Health @ 91% looks suspicious. To be 100% sure its not drive issue keep looking at the HDD/SSD LED while this hang is happening. If its flashing solid it's a bad sign.
The second thought after HDD/SSD is RAM.. try some MEMTEST86 but to be honest we are looking blind here, this specific behavior almost made me convinced its HDD related, I've seen to myself 2 many times.
On the other hand you can run some CPU usage monitoring and right after the freeze show up ckeck it... software issue is still valid option but very unlikely.
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plywrlw

plywrlw

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Jul 5, 2014
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It could be an issue with your sound drivers (I assume you just use the motherboard sound?) try uninstalling, rebooting then downloading and installing the latest drivers.

Failing that I'd be tempted to just nuke it and reinstall Windows but I've never had much patience with my own system when niggling issues like this pop up ;)
 
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Ra_V_en

Ra_V_en

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Jan 17, 2014
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It sounds like a HW issue and this time I'd show over a HDD. I've personally had such behavior many times with Seagate failures, it happens when HDD is trying to read a bad block. You get a PC freeze from nowhere on a simplest task under minor load. Install trial version of HDD Sentinel run a surface test and look over the HDD condition dropping down from 100%

Edit: Some more clues can be visible over smart status... look over the line with Reallocated Sector Count... this value showed incoming problem long before the freezes showed up for good.
 
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nickolaughagus

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Aug 14, 2014
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@Ra_v_en

I did the test for my SSD and the Reallocated sector count came up with Threshold-10 Value-100 Worst-100 Status OK.

Also it says my Health is 91% on this SSD and performance is 100%...
Any other Ideas?
 
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Ra_V_en

Ra_V_en

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Jan 17, 2014
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My bad didn't notice its SSD only unit, still that Health @ 91% looks suspicious. To be 100% sure its not drive issue keep looking at the HDD/SSD LED while this hang is happening. If its flashing solid it's a bad sign.
The second thought after HDD/SSD is RAM.. try some MEMTEST86 but to be honest we are looking blind here, this specific behavior almost made me convinced its HDD related, I've seen to myself 2 many times.
On the other hand you can run some CPU usage monitoring and right after the freeze show up ckeck it... software issue is still valid option but very unlikely.
 
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nickolaughagus

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Aug 14, 2014
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@Ra_V_en

I did the RAM test using that software and it all passed with 100% functionality. I'm currently trying to figure out how to monitor the system to see what the processor is doing using HWiNFO64

I dont really know how to get a view of the log to see what it was doing at the precise time that the jam occurs, unfortunately...
 
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Ra_V_en

Ra_V_en

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I dont really use Hwinfo, but i know AIDA64 has a stability test. You can also check "stress local disks" run it and observe the system. I'm running out of ideas, without additional clues its gonna be a hide and seek game.
 
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nickolaughagus

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Aug 14, 2014
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Okay, so here's what I did, I ran that Stability check for 1 hour straight, computer had no issues, even listened to music to make sure it never hung. Prior to that I did run a defrag on my SSD, so IDK if that could have solved any of my problems. Also, I took out my headphones after the hour was up to find that my motherboard was making a faint repeating beep. It was not like the Error code beeps I have heard it make before when my GPU broke, those were coming from laptop speakers and they were LOUD and lasted longer. These new beeps would go off with 2 very short notes, followed by 4 slightly longer notes. The whole series took 3 seconds to play and it would immediately restart. It doesn't beep now that I restarted laptop.

Ideas?
 
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Ra_V_en

Ra_V_en

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The beeps might be from 3rd party monitoring software (maybe from laptop bundle CD, if you are running some in the background). The stability test could heat up things a bit thus triggering some software alarm. If so the restart was most likely prevention from overheating. If its one time event i reckon its related with the test itself and is none relevant to the main issue. Send us info when this freeze will show again...
 
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