Hello everyone,

I am looking for help and what to do. I have a refurbished Alienware m17 R3 that was sent to me as a replacement for our older 2017 17 R4 that was under warranty and had unfixable damage in a reasonable time.  

First off, I don't think this computer was properly refurbished. It always ran hot but Alienware tech support said that was normal while it was under warranty. I left the computer in the Philippines while I was working in the US so our son could play games on it and it got to the point it would shut down on him and he quit using it very often. Come to find out the processor fan has quit working and didn't even have this computer a year.

Took it to a laptop repair facility and sat with them as they opened it up and holy crud was it filthy inside. So much hair and other debris blocking the vents I don't know how air was getting through. If this had been refurbished by Dell properly there is no way that would have been there. There were numerous screws that were stripped as well and extremely difficult to remove. We verified the processor fan was dead and they found out the fans were one unit for processor and the GPU and we have ordered a new one to put in. There was also evidence of apparent liquid damage corrosion on one of the boards and we have not spilled anything on this laptop. Which again leads me to believe this was not properly refurbished.

I have over the last few weeks been getting more and more BSOD's and freeze up's requiring hard shut downs of the computer. It would often try booting and I would get a searching for media presence message which upon research indicated a possible SSD drive failure. I verified through a hardware test on both support assist as well as windows the SSD is fine. 

I also found I should run sfc /scannow to check for corrupted windows files and first time I ran it it did find corrupted files. This however did not solve the problem and I continued with freeze ups and BSOD’s.

I finally got a picture of the BSOD and it says critical process error. I also ran a complete memory test and it passed both scans.

From what I’ve been able to find, these are the most common reasons for the issues I'm having. But nothing has solved it. Today it froze up where it would not even boot and I ended up having to do a factory reset of windows to even get back to being able to boot. My hope is that would solve the issue. But nope. Even while trying to update windows it crashed multiple times. Even after fully updated it has continued to crash and freeze up. I do not know what else I can do to try to find the problem? The computer is virtually unusable at this point. Even just typing this message out on google docs so it would save the computer has froze up 3 different times and a BSOD once and I ONLY have google docs open. 

I am beginning to think they just sent me a junk computer to get rid of me and the support issue I was having while I was still under support warranty.