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Studio XPS 435MT: System Lockup preceeded by increasing stuttering
I've got the 435MT with the Intel i7 - 920 and 6 GB of ram, an ati 4850 and on-board audio.
I have a problem where seemingly randomly, the system starts to stutter where the mouse stops, audio stops, and presumably everything else for a tenth of a second, then a little longer, until it starts freezing for a second at which point either an un-helpful bluescreen or the video just freezes or it's some corrupted view.
I have CPU monitor on the desktop and it usually isn't very busy. It started when I used Vista and the problem sitll happens on Win 7.
From the Action Center: "The computer has rebooted from a bugcheck. The bugcheck was: 0x0000009c (0x0000000000000000, 0xfffff8800318ec70, 0x0000000000000000, 0x0000000000000000)"
I keep reporting these when the Windows recognizes that something has happened but nothing useful has come back from Microsoft.
I tried the online dell support once but the only suggestion they had was reinstall from the restore... not an exciting prospect.
The problem might be related use of the rear audio ports but I can't be sure because it's so random.
Any suggestions on how to further diagnose the source of the problem would be helpful.
ChrisTheCodeMon
4 Posts
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December 11th, 2009 19:00
I'm starting to think this problem is caused by something to do with standby. I seem to notice it more if the machine just woke up from sleep within about 15 minutes than if I make sure to reboot after waking it. BIOS setting was S3. I went ahead and changed it to S1 to see if that causes any change.
NSDash9
46 Posts
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December 12th, 2009 00:00
Chris:
I had the same problems with my 435MT. See this thread:
http://en.community.dell.com/forums/p/19305425/19593703.aspx#19593703
As a follow-up to that thread, Dell sent a tech out and replaced my motherboard (for the 2nd time in a week), replaced all the RAM and replaced the CPU heat sink and CPU cooling fans. That made absolutely no difference and the computer locked up again within 20 minutes the first time I used it after the tech was here.
I contacted Dell tech support again and after reviewing my situation and all that had been done, they told me they would send a refurbished replacement 435MT. I objected to that and asked for the option to upgrade to a new system, even if I had to pay any difference in cost. I was told that I could not do that, but I was persistent and finally ended up chatting with a supervisor. He initially told me the same thing, but I pushed the issue and he finally agreed to speak to someone and see if anything else could be done. This was the day before Thanksgiving, so it was two days before I heard back, but he called me then and told me that Dell would be exchanging my defective 435MT for a brand new Dell Studio XPS 9000. I am currently waiting to receive that computer.
If your system is under warranty I would recommend that you contact tech support and get them involved in either fixing or replacing your system.
Chris
ChrisTheCodeMon
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December 15th, 2009 01:00
How often was your issue occurring? I don't think mine is anywhere as serious as what you were dealing with. I haven't had it again since I changed my sleep state to S1.
I'm not too eager to deal with tech support again. I did the online thing and let them run my computer but there's no good information associated with the crashes and the tech kept getting distracted by other app crashes which as a programmer, some days I cause alot of those. My computer is covered for another year still so I guess I'll just deal with it unless a solution appears or it gets much worse.
NSDash9
46 Posts
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December 15th, 2009 02:00
Mine started off very intermittently at first, so I didn't get too excited about it initially. I planned to install Window 7 when it was released in October, so I figured the clean installation would take care of the problem. After installing Windows 7 it happened about once a day. I tried everything I could think of, including making sure I had the latest drivers for all my hardware, etc. That did no good, so I went back to a clean installation of Windows Vista and still had the problems, so that's when I got Dell involved. The problem had continued to get worse as time went on and when i stopped using it was happening several times an hour.
Chris