Problem with Dell XPS M1530

Hi all,

For the last few months ive been having a recurring problem with my M1530. In short, the system will run fine for roughly 2 hours. Then, no matter what im doing/running the system will hang, nothing responds, ctrl-alt-delete puts me onto a black screen. If i force shutdown and restart, it will boot fine etc but start all over again. The whole thing (as far as i can tell) just started happening very randomly 1 day. Dell told me to run 1001 tests using their pre-windows diagnostic tool, everything showed to be working correctly, and i mean everything. But the day i got back to them was the day my warranty expired (the luck on that one...) and guess what happened, i never heard from them again..

I've read about the 8600 GT chipsets in the M1530 failing due to a faulty manufacturing process on the part of NVidia but the symptoms listed do not appear to match what i'm getting (apart from the black screen on ctrl-alt-del which may count as the 'no video' symptom given). I've been running the laptop alongside my main PC at this point in time, its been going for about 2 1/2 hours (which is quite good, its usually gone balls up by now) and core temp has recorded the CPU at nothing over 60 degrees, however the palm rest section left of the mouse pointer touch pad seems to get quite warm (i suspect that is where the HD is) which is suspicious, could it be my HD over heating?

Windows Resource Monitor gives the average hard faults in the memory at between 100 - 200, im unsure if thats bad or good, it peaks at 500 and troughs at 2. WRM also gives the disk activity as constantly reading/writing at average 10 mbps, part of which i put down to ESET Smart Security 4 and its constant checking behaviour in the background.

Before the laptop failed, i used it for gaming mostly, DOW2, COD4, BF2, EVE Online etc. I made sure the settings were turned lower than the laptop optimally could handle just to be on the safe side. It was also used for office tasks, emails, internet etc.

Any suggestions guys? Sorry if this has been covered before, i did quickly go over the recent posts to make sure it hasnt been covered.

Thanks.

Its just begun to stop responding now windows resource manager and windows task manager are not responding, neither is ESET Smart Security 4. CPUZ and Core Temp are fine. CPU utilisation is at 5% for both cores, temps are at about 47 degrees for the CPU. Is it the RAM?

I'll run chkdsk firstly for the HD but im unsure how to run memtest as i dont think dells bios will let me set the boot order for the disk drive first (in order to run memtest).