Halp with my computer?

[Nigerius Rex]

If you cant do anything, boot the machine into safe mode and let Windows run chkdsk. While in safe mode, check the event log.

Control panel > administrative tools > event viewer > New window, in the top left expand Windows logs, let the lists populate.

In both the system and application categories, look for items tagged around the most recent bsod as warning or error. If it is a disk error, you will see controller or bad block/sector warning and chkdsk can temporarily repair them. If this is the case though, you need to get a backup going on essential data and send it back to alienware, take it to a shop, or look up a guide for your model laptop and replace it yourself because the drive is on its way out.

The only other culprit I would suspect is memory which you can test for errors with memtest.

Also. Not sure if alienware has proprietary software for heat sensor monitoring, but ATI tool, ati tray tools, and GPU-Z can all give you sensor readings on your graphics card to check for overheating while coretemp can give you cpu and mainboard temperatures.

A good tip regardless of the problem would be to clean the laptop according to its specific model. If you google the model name and the word cleaning, there will likely be a guide on disassembling and cleaning.

[cramx3]

My guess would be over heating, you run a processor intense program and after some time it slows down, cools off for a moment, and then kicks back in.  I wonder if there are other people with your laptop experiencing heat problems.  Is the laptop on your lap?  Make sure you arent blocking any airflow. 

[3xodus]

ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3870 X2

I believe the current driver is 8.57.

New drivers were released almost a month ago. Is that when the problems started?

*edit* I found the mobility version, for some reason it's not on the first menu of the website. You may have already tried this but choose auto detect drivers and see if it throws you a different version

https://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/Pages/index.aspx

[Sintheros]

Well, reinstalling Windows did in fact stop the BSODing, and I believe the framerate failures as well, though I haven't gotten a chance to sit in any graphically intensive programs for too long yet. I'll check it out when I wake up tomorrow.

[Sintheros]

Well it was fine until yesterday, now I've got exactly the same issue as before again (~3/4 minutes of 2 FPS every ~15/20 minutes of running anything graphically intensive).