Dell Inspiron 15-3552 completely freezes unless given constant input

[Cburgess150]

I am at my wit's end here. Research has suggested that its the network access card, which I replaced. I also replaced the memory and hard drive, for good measure. The problem persists in safe mode. No crash dump is created as the freeze is very sudden, and never comes with a BSOD. No beep codes are generated on startup. Dell diagnostics and sfc /scannow come up with no errors.

I reinstalled display drivers, thinking they might be the issue. No dice.

The thing is, if you lazily draw circles on the touchpad while using the machine you would never suspect anything was wrong with it. It runs about as well as you could expect of a low end laptop, and does not struggle in normal web browsing / file editing.

However, if it stops getting input anywhere from 10-30 seconds it will freeze without fail.

I tried simulating mouse movements using autohotkey, causing a small cursor jitter when the cursor was idle for more than 300ms. This did not work, the machine still freezes when no actual input is given.

Does anyone know what could be causing this? I'm about to just write it off as a bad motherboard.

 

[clutchc]

Since you've pretty well changed the hardware I would have suspected, it may be time to go after software conflicts. It sounds like it might be something that only activates when the system is idle.
Try running CCleaner and do the Clean and Registry potions both.

If that doesn't do the job, it might be malware or a virus. Do a full scan with your virus app after updating it. Then run a malware check with Malwarebytes.

Lastly, check if you have some poorly written software running in the background. Look in the tray for stuff you can start disabling.