Hi there,

I have a laptop (Dell XPS L701X) that arrived at my home in January of 2011. Its never given me any troubles except for very random Blue Screen of Death occurrences that started about three months ago. The exact error message that is displayed on the BSOD is:

"A clock interrupt was not received on a secondary processor within the allocated time interval."

There seems to be no correlation between what I'm doing and when the BSOD will appear. I do play an online game called EverQuest quite often, so most of my crashes are when I try to zone into another map/area of the game. However, like I said, that's just because of how frequently I play the game and it's by no means the only time when I crash. I've received the BSOD plenty of other times when the game wasn't even opened and I was simply browsing random internet websites (gaming forums, eBay, etc.). It will just freeze up entirely, display the blue screen, force me to hard boot and it will then start up as if nothing ever happened.

This went on for approximately the past three months up to and including about three weeks ago. In this instance, the BSOD (same error message as always) displayed and prevented me from starting up Windows after I hard booted. Instead of running Windows, it ran the Windows Startup Repair Utility and told me that there was an error that was unable to be fixed and that I should contact my system administrator. Upon seeing this I took it to a computer repair shop which told me I had 48KB of "bad sector" on the hard drive and that it needed to be replaced. This was the only issue they could see and told me that it was likely the main problem.

A new hard drive later (which I told them not to copy over an image of my old hard drive just in case the problem was software related) and I found myself crashing to the same BSOD literally ten minutes after getting the laptop home from the shop. Quite frustrated, I started doing Google searches like crazy. Every single result told me to:

1. Remove any additional RAM/memory that wasn't factory-installed
2. Stop overclocking the processor
3. Stop dual-booting
4. Run CPU stress tests to determine if it's a processor hardware error
5. Run RAM/memory stress tests to determine if it's a memory error

... so I did. Suggestions one, two and three do not apply to me as I do not have any additional RAM/memory installed and I do not overclock or dual boot. Stress tests performed on the CPU and the memory (from two separate programs on each piece of hardware) told me that everything was running normal and that there were no suspected issues. Sure enough, however, thirty minutes after searching for more suggestions, I locked up and blue screened. Ugh.

I have all of the crash reports and DMP files if anyone would be interested in seeing those. However, they don't seem to help much because I'm not particularly well versed with hardware and Google searches don't really bring back information that's different from what I've read before. Since I don't seem to be able to upload attachments, feel free to just leave your e-mail and I can forward them to you.

My last ditch effort will be to obtain a new PSU for the laptop. Like I said before, however, I'm not particularly well versed with hardware so it's my understanding that a PSU for a laptop is simply an external AC adapter cable/plug feeding from the wall outlet to the laptop. If for some reason this has become defective and it's not  producing proper voltage, I'm guessing that could cause errors that lead to hardware failure and blue screens and all of that. Please do correct me if I'm wrong or if you have any other ideas as to what would be causing this.

Thanks a lot in advance and I appreciate the time and support!