Unsolved
5 Practitioner
•
274.2K Posts
0
731
Area-51m, freezing from time to time, #6
Completely locks up for about 5 seconds at random intervals, usually hours between lock-ups. Dell even replaced my entire A51M about 4 months ago due to an unrelated warranty issue, and yet the problem persists. I did swap back in my dual M2 drives, and those are aftermarket 1TB EVO 970 Plus SSDs. Problem existed from when my machine was shipped new in March 2019.
The Synaptics touchpad does . An horrible piece of engineering. I have another issue with the touchpad I'll post in a separate thread, but when using touchpad in Acrobat Pro or Reader, any version, and I click the scrollbar 2x (the BAR, not the arrows), the stupid laptop keeps scrolling the PDF. Utter stupidity. My logitech mouse doesn't do it. EVERY POSSIBLE EXTRA option in the touchpad config is disabled and yet the issue persists.
So what's a buyer of a $4k+ computer to do? Tolerate it, I guess. So stupid.
Nuelan
5 Posts
0
April 30th, 2020 02:00
Hi,
I have the same problem with intermittent freezing. Exactly like you : exists from date of shipping, 5 seconds at random intervals. The only support that was given by Dell was to erase all the laptop and put image factory again, which obviously would not help - they replaced your laptop and you still have the problem.
Do you have tobii installed on your system? I was wondering if this freeze problem could be related to it (I had several other problems with tobii).
Anonymous
5 Practitioner
5 Practitioner
•
274.2K Posts
0
April 30th, 2020 07:00
I have the Tobii functionality disabled via software, but the HW is still active in device manager. I cannot imagine what the problem could be. So to be sure, I've not "reimaged" my system back to factory defaults nor tried my replacement system before swapping the SSDs over, but my original A51M from March 2019 did this out of the box last year, and yes the brand new warranty replacement also does it. I'm running BIOS 1.9.3, and latest drivers almost always, and it never gets better. Not sure what Dell will do about the issues, and its unfortunate.
The sheer amount of combinations of configuration to disable to troubleshoot this issue means that we're more likely to accidentally finding the issue or end up with a solution than the issue being addressed or fixed by Dell.
I had a problem last November where after BIOS update 181, my secondary hybrid drive was inaccessible because the new BIOS broke the functionality that asked for the HDD passwords upon boot. I had to roll back my BIOS to 173 and it eventually took Dell nearly 4 months to fix it with the 193 BIOS.
c0ach
3 Posts
0
May 4th, 2020 13:00
Hello. I had exactly the same issue of RANDOM system freezes. I did the following and it seems that the problem is finally solved:
1) If you have replaced the preinstalled Hynix M.2 SSD with a Samsung M.2 SSD NVMe 970 Pro, change the BIOS settings from RAID to AHCI. Run the NVMe driver from Samsung's website, run Samsung Magician and you will finally see it being recognized instead of mentioning it as "N/A" (Not Available). You will also see that the storage NVMe Controller is finally present at Device Manager.
2) Uninstall Tobii COMPLETELY.
3) Update EVERY Intel driver with Intel Driver Support Assistant.
All above suggestions were mentioned by other owners of a Dell Alienware Area-51m who had experienced the same issue, and it helped them solve it. As it seems it helped me as well.
PS: PDF thumbnail generation was a mess previously but now it is also working, finally. I just installed Foxit PDF Reader. Both Acrobat Pro and Acrobat Reader that I previously used cause mouse lags. With Foxit PDF Reader, everything is perfect in my Dell Alienware, for now.
Report back if issue is solved.