17 R5, freezes randomly for a few seconds

So i've had my Alienware 17 R5 since July 2018, and I absolutely LOVE the laptop. It's the best i've had in years, but recently after a few alienware updates I presume, i've noticed my laptop will randomly freeze completely, won't be able to move the mouse or anything, this lasts anwyhere from 5 to 10 seconds and then it starts working again as normal.

I can't figure out what the issue is.......some days it'll be fine for hours and only happen once that day and others it'll occur a handful of times.   I can't for the life of me figure it out.

I want to sort this out and get to the bottom of the issue......I'd like to also point out that I checked my restore points and I don't have any that were before I started experiencing this issue.......I'm not terribly experienced in re-installing  Windows and I would rather not go that route IF possible....Specs of laptop:

Alienware 17 R5 (17.3" laptop) 

i7 8750H CPU @ 2.20ghz  (pretty sure mine is overclocked atm, according to AWCC it's at 3.88ghz)  but I can't unclock it, more on that below........

1TB HDD 7200RPM + 256GB SSD

16GB DDR4 memory

Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 8GB GPU

Few extra notes:

My Alienware command center may be slightly borked, the "Overclock" feature doesn't work, or rather have any options available, it simply says "N/A" i'm not sure if this has anything to do with it.....

2) I installed a bunch of updated drivers from the Alienware Updater a few weeks ago because they kept pestering me to do so, i finally gave in and this occured, however, the problem didn't pop up right away and as I said, I don't have any restore points from before this instance.

3) I was getting some screen flickering black, so I thought it was a GPU driver issue, I uninstalled and re-installed the Nvidia GeForce driver through the GeForce Experience by performing a "Clean installation" of the GPU via this tool, it seemed to have fixed the screen flickering but not the intermittent freezes of my system.

Any/all help is appreciated.......has anyone experienced this issue before with their Alienware 17 R5?  The laptop is definitely usable, because these freezes are so sporadic and don't last but a few seconds, it's more of an annoyance.......I'm trying to save up for a new laptop but money's tight and i don't make much, I was lucky I could afford this one at the time.   Thanks!