camerontweedle

As an update - symptoms appear to be lessened with TurboBoost turned off, but definitely NOT alleviated completely. Also, I've run the ePSA tests (both quick and thorough) and they didn't turn anything up, so it appears to be some sort of software issue. Any thoughts? Anything related to TurboBoost that would make sense to look at?

Thanks for the response. SSD is Intel, I believe. I can double check this when I get home again. CPU Temps definitely heat up during gaming. (High 90's) GPU temps come up, but not nearly as high (not usually over 80) Windows is up to date. As an update, throttling the CPU via the power management didn't seem to do the trick, so I completely shut off the turbo boost, and for the past 2 days it hasn't given me any troubles. I won't really feel comfortable until it's gone a whole week without doing it at this point, but regarding having Dell replace my CPU, can anyone give me some idea of what sort of mess I'm in for if I continue to have issues after the warranty expires?

I've read through the last 10 or so pages of the forums and didn't notice anything that seemed exactly like the problem I've been having, so I'm hoping some of the more experienced members can provide some insight, as I've learned plenty just from reading through some of the stickys and general threads already. Background: This is my first gaming laptop, and so far the experience has been really positive. I had narrowed my search down to the M14x and was debating on some of the non-stock upgrades when I stumbled upon somebody selling a barely-used one on a local classified site. The comp was nearly new (he had ended up with an M17x shortly after, so most of the plastic covers were even still on). He had opted to go with the i7 CPU upgrade and 1666 mhz RAM, and had installed an SSD himself in place of the standard drive, and was selling for about the price of the default, no upgrades M14x. I was pretty excited about it. About 2 weeks ago, I started running into issues, and I'm not really certain what's causing it, but with only 44 days left on the warranty, I'd like to get some feedback about whether or not to contact support to get them messing around with it. The only way I can think to describe the issue is "extreme lag", since I haven't really received a BSOD from it at all. So far, it's occurred during a wide range of activities - from gaming to general web browsing. It also doesn't completely freeze, either. I can still move the mouse, and in some cases I can even open the windows menu, it just won't let me click on anything and doesn't respond to input. Forced restart is sometimes successful, but often I've noticed that it will continue again within a few seconds of booting up. The most consistent remedy has been to close the lid, wait for it to go into sleep mode, and then log back in. If that works, what will usually happen is input that I tried to give it during the "freeze" will catch back up. So, if I had tried opening a browser, it will have loaded. If I had tried opening the control panel, it's up, closed menus are gone, etc. I've noticed that it seems to be somehow related to high CPU load (entering a new zone in a game, loading up a bunch of tabs in a browser, letting a video buffer while swapping back to another task, etc.). My first idea was to disable the turbo-boost. While I haven't tested it for long periods without turbo boost, I did notice that disabling it from BIOS would still leave me with the same issues when booting up after a freeze. As others have noted, my CPU temp seems to be running pretty high (mid-high 90s) but I figured that disabling turbo boost would have remedied that, so I haven't revisited that lately. I'm at work right now, and don't have full access to my system specs, but here are some general ones: -M14x R1 -i7 CPU (not sure which specifically, but it's 2.2 - 3.3 with turbo) -Non-stock SSD -Windows 7, 64 bit -1.5 GT555M GPU -A08 Bios version - 8 GB RAM And here's what I've tried on it so far: -Avast Anti-virus scan (both from regular boot and from safe mode) -Malwarebytes Scan -Turn off Turbo Boost from Bios -Updated all available drivers, most notably both of the GPU ones -Defrag -Safe mode. Seems to work fine here, even amidst crashes. IE. It will freeze while in Firefox/Chrome. I can boot into Safe Mode with networking just fine, open Firefox or Chrome just fine and continue with what I was doing OR poke around to try to DL drivers, etc. but when restarting and booting back up again in normal, it will still freeze. -Last night I throttled the CPU down to 99% within the power management settings (this happens both while plugged in and on battery, BTW) and had a pretty successful night, even though temps did spike up to 97-98c a couple times. That said, it's been happening very sporadically, so I wouldn't assume it's resolved until I can go a solid week without any issues. I also would like to test some of the specific situations that were giving me trouble the night before (ie, Zone Swapping during Co-op play in D3) since it happened every single time I tried that on Monday. Any thoughts? Liek I said, there's 44 days left on the warranty, but I'm not sure how I feel about shelling out nearly $300 to extend it another year, so I'd like to get some feedback about what the specific issue may be before having Dell fix/replace the wrong thing and ending up with some other faulty parts. Thanks in advance for any ideas, help. If you need more information, let me know, and I can get more specific system specs this evening when I get home.