Hi all,

I have an Alienware m17 R2 (Intel Core i7-9750H CPU @ 2.60GHz, 16 GB of memory, running Windows 10 Home). In early September I started having an issue where the machine would sometimes freeze at the Alienware logo when starting up. The little spinning dots would appear for a moment, then stop spinning. At first, simply restarting the computer would solve the problem, but then there came a day (this was maybe a week and a half ago now) when the computer refused to boot successfully no matter how many times I restarted it. The machine tried to run some automatic repair utilities, including the Alienware OS Recovery, but it would always freeze in the middle of the attempt.

I tried a few different things, including returning to a system restore point and even resetting Windows. In each case, the machine would then boot successfully maybe 3 to 5 times, then hang again. I thought the problem might be the BIOS – I think the issue began around the time 1.6.0 was released and I attempted to install it via Support Assist; I’m not sure it successfully installed at the time.

So I manually flashed the BIOS to 1.6.0 from 1.3.1. Again, this helped temporarily, but eventually the problem showed up again. The machine’s pre-boot diagnostics indicated that the memory is OK, and the hard drive is allegedly fine, too, but I can’t help thinking this seems like either a hardware or a firmware problem. The computer is less than a year old, I didn’t put many programs on it, and I surf pretty innocuous internet sites, so I don’t think any of those things are related to this issue.

Has anyone else encountered this? Would it be helpful to flash back to the intermediate BIOS, 1.5.2 (or whatever it was)? I’ve tried most of the solutions I can think of.