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Hello all, i am quite new to this so bear with me.

A couple of months ago i had gotten an alienware aurora alx r4 - could play anything, i got Battlefield 3 and had an error where small dots of white with small gap between each would appear and a buzz sound from the speakers, i assumed it was possibly my drivers or graphics card, and it happened at random.
could play for maybe 20 mins then sometimes 5, i gave up on bf3 thinking it may have been the game seeing as i seen on other posts it could have been Realtek audio, i now tried playing The secret world and its doing it on this, but soon as i log into the game i didn't understand why so i've disabled my realtek, same problem, i've reinstalled drivers, games etc still to no success.

opened up my computer and monitored fans etc all working fine and my alienware control panel says nothings overheating ? i just need some help if anyone has some ideas.

thanks.

Also it restarts my computer when it happens, and it comes up with windows encountered an error i go into more info and it says its a bluescreen error

Codesta wrote:

Hello all, i am quite new to this so bear with me.

A couple of months ago i had gotten an alienware aurora alx r4 - could play anything, i got Battlefield 3 and had an error where small dots of white with small gap between each would appear and a buzz sound from the speakers, i assumed it was possibly my drivers or graphics card, and it happened at random.
could play for maybe 20 mins then sometimes 5, i gave up on bf3 thinking it may have been the game seeing as i seen on other posts it could have been Realtek audio, i now tried playing The secret world and its doing it on this, but soon as i log into the game i didn't understand why so i've disabled my realtek, same problem, i've reinstalled drivers, games etc still to no success.

opened up my computer and monitored fans etc all working fine and my alienware control panel says nothings overheating ? i just need some help if anyone has some ideas.

thanks.

To make sure it's not a hardware problem do some stress testing on the CPU and GPU at the same time. Also do a memtest for the RAM. If the system is stable than the logical conclusion is that software is causing the issue. At this point you should address through official channels the party at fault, in this case the game developers. If the say it's not their fault, rather the video drivers or what have you, then address the other party. I doubt someone here would be able to help you, though i remember the issue since the BF3 BETA (i wasn't affected, i mostly got TDRs back then but it turned out to be caused by the nvidia drivers). You could try to check the EA BF3 forum archives, i'm sure there are plenty of threads regarding audio "hang up" and "game crashing due to drivers".

Based on the limited information given so far, it could be any one of a number of things - flaky RAM, failing PSU, malware, flaky motherboard, flaky video card, etc. I'd start by running a RAM diagnostic (http://www.memtest.org/); if that comes up clean, do a scan with Malwarebytes (http://www.malwarebytes.org/lp/malware_lp_form). If that doesn't turn anything up, you're probably going to need to start swapping out individual components to find the culprit (or just RMA the whole system if it is still under warranty).

If you can give us more details (what is displayed when you get the BSOD?) we may be able to help you narrow things down a bit.

just brew it! wrote:

If you can give us more details (what is displayed when you get the BSOD?) we may be able to help you narrow things down a bit.

And to do that you'll probably have to go into the Advanced System Settings (from the control panel or your system properties), click on Settings for "Startup and Recovery" and uncheck the "Automatically restart" option.

You can also have a look in your event log (Start run -> event viewer) -- look for critical events in the System log under Windows Logs.

just brew it! wrote:

[...]If that doesn't turn anything up, you're probably going to need to start swapping out individual components to find the culprit (or just RMA the whole system if it is still under warranty).[...]

That might be a bad idea (the swapping of parts for testing) since it's an OEM rig i pressume warranty will be voided as soon as he opens the case (assuming there are some seals put there by the OEM).

To RMA he does indeed need to figure out if the system is the source of the issue. It would indeed help if OP could make a picture of the BSOD screen and post it here, or atleast write all the codes that are displayed.

I've done the boot up Test to check all parts are fine and some other ram testing, also disabled and deleted audio drivers to see if it was same problem as battlefield 3 but its not, reinstalled some graphics drivers and tried others that also didn't work. I have an image of it, not quite sure how to put it on here ?

Codesta wrote:

I've done the boot up Test to check all parts are fine

No idea what this means. Do you mean the tests the computer does when you first turn it on? That doesn't verify that all of the components are "fine"; it just verifies that they are receiving power and are able to respond when the CPU says "Hey, are you there?"

Codesta wrote:

and some other ram testing

What tool did you use for this "other RAM testing"?

Arclight wrote:

That might be a bad idea (the swapping of parts for testing) since it's an OEM rig i pressume warranty will be voided as soon as he opens the case (assuming there are some seals put there by the OEM).

Yeah, that's a potential concern... but most desktop systems are (still) designed to be upgradeable by the user. Anything the user adds isn't covered, obviously... but the original base system should be.

Codesta wrote:

[...] I have an image of it, not quite sure how to put it on here ?

Flikr dot com?
http://www.flickr.com/

Arclight wrote:

Codesta wrote:

[...] I have an image of it, not quite sure how to put it on here ?

Flikr dot com?
http://www.flickr.com/

For a one-shot picture, imgur.com is even easier (especially if you don't already have a flickr / yahoo account). Note also that to post an img tag here you need a direct link to the image (jpg / gif / png) which flickr technically doesn't allow per its TOS (it's still quite possible to do, and I've never heard boo from them when I've done it, but we probably shouldn't be encouraging it).