Alienware x51 with a serious problem.

Mikeh13

Reputable
Nov 30, 2015
1
0
4,510
Hello folks: Until recently (the past few months) my kids loved my 2.5 year old x51. It played games flawlessly without so much as a hiccup. One day, we turned on old faithful and it booted up per usual and then simply froze and crashed on the nytimes homepage. It then did the oddest thing and attempted to turn itself on over and over again until I finally unplugged it. It has been doing this continuously for the past few weeks, necessitating a trip to geek squad wherein i flushed 150 bux down the crapper as they did s "system scan" and failed to diagnose or fix anything. It now randomly crashes and freezes, and the rebooting efforts go on and on. I suspect a video card issue, but I'm just a father not a tech expert. The machine runs as follows:

Intc core i5 -4430@3.00ghz
8mb ram
GeForce gtx 660 card.

My kids play minecraft and castle crashers. Nothing particularly complex, it seems.

Can anyone venture a guess or suggest a video card update that might make sense? Thanks. Sorry for long post.
 

misteriosly

Reputable
Jun 1, 2015
605
1
5,360
Start with checking temperatures, how old is that Laptop ? Is it used in bed or do you smoke/eat around it ?
If temperatures are OK, check hard drive life(statuses) with HDTune or CrystalDisk.
If everything is fine so far, check RAM, you can do test with MEMtest, you can download it and burn it to flash, just google it.
Give us feedback what's going on after tests.