Good Friday everyone. This is going to be a rather lengthy post. I have a serious issue now with my laptop, Alienware M17XR4. Ever since Nvidia released their latest driver on January 7th, 2014, my laptop has had a serious issue of being able to maintain playing any video game. It will run my games smoothly, and quite efficiently, then randomly, the laptop's monitor will turn black, lock up, freeze and it USE to restart. Now however, it will go black, and be locked up. Forever. I have to hard restart it. (pressing the power button)
Now before anyone starts asking me if I have done "A thru Z" procedures to fix this problem, I have been troubleshooting and trying all the possible remedies that has been posted about this issue. In my search of finding a solution to this issue, BSOD 116- Nvidia .sys files are crashing/failing, I have noticed that there are posts all over the internet talking about this issue since 2008. It seems to me that this is a reoccurring issue and the problem either goes away randomly (possibly from an updated driver) or, the crashes are so bad that they end up frying the GPU itself- thus resulting in a whole new GPU being ordered and even in some extreme cases, a brand new laptop is purchased.
As an open ended question(s): Why is this? Why and even how, is it possible that a driver issue from 2008 is still able to lurk around to modern times, and Nvidia still has not done anything about it? If you are to go to the geforce forums of Nvidia, they will not aid you in the best of ways. Most of the time you are pointed in the direction of their "TDR statement", which I believe is complete <profanity>. Passing the buck can only go so far but when it comes to individuals who have spent their hard earned money, and invested themselves and time into a company, why is it that the creators of the device that is triggering my crashes are not taking any form of responsibility?
I must digress. This crashing problem started a few days after the installation of the Nvidia update in January. When this crash became a problem, as a logical person should, I reverted back to older drivers (last known good ones) and yes, before you ask, I performed clean installs. I utilized Nvidias DDU, and also CCleaner and Driver Sweeper when re-installing this older drivers. However, unfortunately, the problem persisted. I ran virus scans. Nothing. I installed "BlueScreen Viewer" and through the use of this program, I was able to read my crash/dmp files. I had a recorded 14 crashes that were recorded. Each case had 3 files that were being flagged for the cause. I will now list them:
dxgkrnl.sys “dxgkrnl.sys+5d140” - in all 14 cases
dxgmms1.sys “dxgmms1.sys+37f3c” - in 12 cases
“dxgmms1.sys+37f00” - in the other 2 cases
nvlddmkm.sys- in 10 cases, with “nvlddmkm.sys+8f0f50” 6 times, “nvkflt.sys+15010”, 4 times,
nvkflt.sys - in 4 cases with “nvkflt.sys+15010” 4 times
After running the Dell Support Diagnosis as well, the bluescreen analyzer test was picking up the same exact GPU error that was crashing my laptop during game play. I installed the Nvidia beta drivers, (which are now the latest drivers) and ran a serious of full virus scans on my laptop as well- suggested from the Diagnosis reports. To no avail. Same issue.
Looking for further possible solutions, I decided to get technical with my laptop. I changed the GPU speed, GPU settings (all through Nvidia programs ie: utility control) I changed the GPU from Quality to Performance and I even went as far as changing reg coding (to increase the window of TDR and what not). And again. No avail. I reached the end of my patience and decided to start over fresh.
I fully cleaned out my laptop. Physically as well as mentally? I ensured that all parts were connected and there was no damage (yes i took apart my alienware, put it back together just as it was. Thank you for the youtube videos on how to do so btw) I cleaned it out with compressed air (there was a lot of dust, however, earlier tests showed that the temps of the CPU and GPU were fine. ~50c. And then i re installed windows fresh. I took my time, re-installed everything that came with my laptop via resource disk. I updated all possible drivers. Except the Nvidia drive of course. I then went online and performed the Dell Diagnosis test as well, another full system scan. The only thing that came back was to update my GPU drivers and to install a virus program.
Thinking that everything was fine now, I installed World of Warcraft. I logged in. Was playing perfectly fine. Then locked up. This time, it was a serious lock up. I left the laptop be for 45 minutes and it did not restart. It was completely frozen. Being in this situation before, when my HDD when dead, I ran the Alienware Self Check test. the one you run through the BIOs. I performed the full scan/check. No problems. I even took pictures of it as well. No problems were detected. Everything passed with flying colors. Currently, at this very moment, I am on my desktop and I have my laptop next to me performing another full dell diagnosis scan on it.
I am so confused. If there is no hardware issues found. And I installed a fresh copy of Windows 7 Ultimate 64x, what is the issue? I have read on various forums from before that a simple reinstall of Windows does not solve this on going issue with the Nvidia driver, however, I did have to try for myself. Everyone else, and I mean literally everyone else who has had this problem, all pointed to their GPU just failing, or their memory failing, something failing. Yet, after test after test, my hardware is not failing.
I am sorry for the lengthy post, but, I have been in the shadows working on my laptop for nearly a month straight. I did not want to make a post until it was a need of help. I am in need of help.
Thank you for taking the time and effort to reading this post. I look forward to suggestions, comments, solutions- anything. Thank you again.