Hi all,

Like many other owners of an XPS 8940/50 with an NVidia RTX (3060Ti), I’ve been having problems with the machine randomly freezing every 2-5 days for many many months. I have to hold down the power button to reset and on the rare occasions where I’ve had a mini dmp, the error is always VIDEO_TDR_TIMEOUT. If I disable the nvidia and run purely (multi mon) on the Intel mobo gfx, there is no lockup. Using Bios 2.8 and obviously latest drivers and Win 11 updates.

Dell support have been responsive, but for those of us who’ve been in IT (dev) for several decades, it can be a painful process. I’ve had replacement (refurb yuck) mobo and gfx card to no avail and the only other step to take which I’ve resisted as it didn’t seem to have worked for anyone was Win 11 reinstallation (which would be win 10 then upgrade again). 

As a desperate last hope, I determined to clear out as many warnings / errors from EventViewer as possible. This was when I found that if I actually do a Shutdown as opposed to a Restart, I ended up with EventID 14 from source nvlddmkm. Watching the startup I could see a screen flicker when this happened and caused the nvidia to instigate a recovery. This is essentially the same timeout issue which appears to precede the hang, so resolving this seemed likely to be important.

Following this rabbit hole led to an interesting point that stated this could mean there was some sort of device contention problem. Turning off the onboard Intel gfx in the bios however (not recommended) didn’t help with getting rid of the event error however. I pondered the fact that this was only happening after a full Shutdown and (perhaps incorrectly!) wondered if it could be related to something I’d seen in passing on one of the many web sites I’d been digging through - Windows Fast Startup.

Once I finally found the option to disable this (see below) and did my 400th shutdown and start for the day (aaaaargh) I was blessed with a clean bill of health from EventViewer! Something within the Fast Startup mechanism was causing it - perhaps someone with more energy left can figure out the details for interest:)

So having resolved this, the machine has now been up for 6 days and counting, which is longer than any previous good spell. I’m hesitant to say the war is won, but it just might be and perhaps it’s worth letting the rest of you poor forlorn ‘freezers’ give it a go

Hope this helps - let me know how you get on, instructions below.

(@Dell - if this is the fix, do I get a reward?, I think I’ve just saved you over $100k 🥳 hehe)

1. Press Win + R to open Run.
2. Type control and click OK to open the Control Panel.
3. Go to System and Security and then click on Power Options.
4. In the left pane, click on Choose what the power buttons do.
5. Next, click the Change settings that are currently unavailable link.
6. Under the Shutdown settings section, uncheck the Turn on fast startup option to turn it off.
7. Click Save changes to apply the changes.