Faulty memory causing PC freeze?

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Yordancho

Commendable
Aug 20, 2016
2
0
1,510
Hi guys, apologies if this is the wrong section to post this but I am seriously confused right now.

I have a Dell inspiron 3521 laptop with a one 8GB ram stick. For several weeks now my PC has been freezing up (usually I notice this happens when it gets under high load - most commonly watching YouTube or if I have too many things running). I can tell when it's going to freeze as the sound starts tearing. Sometimes I will get a BSOD - whea_uncorrectable_error. Sometimes the PC will just stay frozen. HOWEVER when I pick up my laptop by the bottom (where the RAM and the Hard disk are) or move it slightly, then it unfreezes (usually it freezes again after a couple of seconds).

My question is: Is it possible for faulty RAM to cause this? Maybe a faulty Hard drive? I have ran a chkdisk as well as a Memtest86 and a mdsched.exe. All of them come back as though nothing is wrong. I have two RAM slots in my PC and I have tried using both, but the problem persists. Also I have tried to run my laptop without the batter to eliminate that as the culprit.

If anyone has any idea what faulty piece of hardware could be causing this, please share and I want to buy a new component. Thank you :)
 
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marko55

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Nov 29, 2015
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The fact that when you pick it up it unfreezes is kinda baffling! haha.

Install core temp & see if your CPU temps are getting super high when its starts getting close to, or freezing. Your heatsink fan may be clogged up & picking it up is allowing it to get just enough hot air out to get its temp back down & stop throttling. If your temps are getting in the 100c range or higher, you'll wanna take the bottom of the laptop off, blow out the heatsink's fan assembly and probably apply some aftermarket thermal paste to the CPU. I've seen this happen with laptops before & doing this dropped temps by 20-30c (no joke).
 
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Yordancho

Commendable
Aug 20, 2016
2
0
1,510
Hi Marko thanks for the response! Wow I'll definitely give that a try just to improve the overall performance. However the reason I don't think the temperature is the problem is because I've been able to play games when the CPU gets quite hot and not have the laptop freeze up and vice versa I've had situations where it freezes when the CPU is very cool (I use my hand to check :D ) But I'll download the program to keep and eye on them for future reference.

What I don't understand is what hardware component is capable of freezing the whole system for a couple of seconds when disconnected and then resuming like nothing had happened when connected again. Is this the case with a hard drive?

At this point I'm thinking of just buying a new RAM stick and if it's not the problem well wohoo I have twice the RAM at least :D

 
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