Computer crashes slowly

[Asadinator]

Dell Studio XPS 435MT i7-920 6GB Vista 64bit

This happens after a while, never early.

I am either listening to youtube videos or playing games and suddenly I can hear crackling in the speakers where the sound gets fuzzy. Later (~10mins) the screen and mouse pointer has these jumps and everything starts becoming crackly and freezing. And finally the whole computer freezes and doesn't respond, only way to fix it is to restart.

It's like a slow death and when I get these symptoms I save everything and restart.

My computer is relatively new, what's causing this?

[Transfusion]

If interference is manifesting itself... It may possibly be your power supply. I can recount a similar incident I experienced with an underpowered computer crashing at random intervals.

[Daisymae70]

Dell Studio XPS 435MT i7-920 6GB Vista 64bit

This happens after a while, never early.

I am either listening to youtube videos or playing games and suddenly I can hear crackling in the speakers where the sound gets fuzzy. Later (~10mins) the screen and mouse pointer has these jumps and everything starts becoming crackly and freezing. And finally the whole computer freezes and doesn't respond, only way to fix it is to restart.

It's like a slow death and when I get these symptoms I save everything and restart.

My computer is relatively new, what's causing this?

If your computer is relatively new I would go straight to the source.  Especially if it is still under warranty.


http://support.dell.com/support/index.aspx?c=us&l=en&s=dhs

[marozie]

Something very similar just started happening to me, except my computer is not new and I haven't made any recent changes to either hardware or software. It seems like a hardware issue, and at first I thought it was a problem with my graphics card. But the other day it happened while I was listening to music, and I don't know how else to describe it other than to say that the exact same thing happened to the audio that happened to the graphics: slow deterioration until the point of everything stopping. It's really bizarre and I don't even know how to go about trouble shooting. I've done virus scans, malware scans, registry scans, but nothing. This thread is the only thing I've come across that sounds anything like what I'm experiencing.