I have a used/imported Dell Precision 5560 with an Intel i7-11850H, 32 GB of RAM, and an RTX A2000. It randomly becomes completely unresponsive, most often during games, video editing, or Visual Studio, although it has also frozen while I was only using Windows. The only way to recover is to hold the power button.
The freezes do not appear to be caused by overheating; they have occurred at roughly 55–60°C. Dell's full and advanced diagnostics passed, CPU and memory stress tests completed successfully, and GPU testing did not trigger the issue consistently. I have also run DISM, checked Windows system files, changed power and FPS settings, reduced system performance, and updated the graphics drivers without finding a permanent fix.
Event Viewer mainly shows Kernel-Power entries after each forced shutdown, along with some GPU and power-management events, but no clear preceding error. What else should I test, and could this point to a motherboard, firmware, power-delivery, or GPU problem despite the individual component tests passing?
1 Answer
Try booting a Linux live environment and leave it running on the desktop for a while. If it hard-freezes there too, that makes a Windows or driver issue much less likely and points toward firmware or hardware. I would also do a genuinely clean graphics-driver reinstall using DDU, then install the appropriate Dell-tested driver rather than only updating over the existing one.
I tried both a Linux live boot and a clean GPU-driver installation, but the freezes still happen.