Area 51 freezing

Hi,

First, can anyone provide a live link to the Area 51 service manual? It used to be available here http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/systems/Alw_dt_Area_51/en/sm/sm_en.pdf  but it's not there anymore.

My Area 51 desktop started freezing yesterday while browsing, gaming or even during simple idle operation, it doesn’t matter what it’s doing. Every 30-60 minutes I have to restart the computer after a forced shutdown.

I’ve cleaned the chassis thoroughly with compressed air and even removed and cleaned the graphics card (GTX 580) but to no avail. All tests run from AlienAutopsy or from the hidden boot option passed without problems.

Next step will be to remove the memory sticks one by one and check if that helps.

The freezing itself is weird too, because sometimes it’s an outright hard freeze and nothing responds, sometimes I can move the cursor and the audio plays normally, sometimes I can even start the task manager or switch windows for a while but sooner or later the whole computer becomes unresponsive.

One other thing I noticed is that upon shutdown/restart sometimes the BIOS boot process stops at about 2/3 through and never progresses, one or more hard shutdown/restarts is required.

There was no specific change or software update that triggered this so I’m quite baffled.