Dell XPS 15 (9550) list of hardware and software problems

Well, I think I figured out why I cant load my factory image. The Intel RST drivers are not loaded in the Windows PE environment, nor were they in Windows 8 RE.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/2826045

So can someone help me ( step by strep guide would be awesome) figure out how to add them according to the post below.

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/dn938381(v=vs.85).aspx

I wish I knew how to do that. Right now, Dell is sending a replacement laptop.

 

Did you get any BSODs, etc.? Or is your problem solved?

 

Seems OK. My experience is that the tests seem to vary when you run them.
I can see though that you the 1TB version, as the write speeds are in the 900s, while on the 512GB they are around 600 MB/s.

Looks like your are from Denmark

 

NO BSOD´s after Samsung NVme install So far so good! One freeze only but that happens from time to time in Windows!
NO Blackscreens after Samsung NVme install But I will give it a day more before I conclude the problem solved. But very optimistic now!

 

OK - and yes Denmark

 

. 19, of course. Tried every possible BIOS setting that I found, but with no success.

 

No, windows 10.

 

Guys have you found any solution to the fan ramping up while using USB C? I'm using a Dell DA200

 

They just delayed my 9550 by 2 days, comes the 19th now. Ordered on the 4th haha.

 

i would like to do that, but on my place the all new XPS still no available yet, and no return policy too.

so thats why i m asking to the owner here before pull the trigger on these beautiful beast.

when i read few page behind, so the first thing we're going to do on the new machine was to upgrade all the driver including bios and fresh instal OS to avoid short battery life, throttling, and faulty fan controls issues on the unit ?

 

yap, i already see that review. but i think its good to ask the real owner of this laptop too right ? the notebookcheck says. it need to update to prevent all those issues on the unit.

 

anyone has an issue with slow boot times with a mouse connected? without any devices connected i boot @ about 14 sec to windows login.
but with a mouse (tried a logitech anywhere mx mouse & razer abysuss) connected upon boot. it takes about 45 sec.

i suspect my bios is trying to boot from the mouse.
tried the following.
1. turned off usb boot in bios - no difference
2. reflashed bios no difference
3. uninstalled native usb drivers - no difference
4. installed mouse drivers - no difference

i tried changed the boot sequence to have boot priority to the ssd and later usb... but struggled to do so both in legacy and uefi mode, will try again tonight.

was wondering if anyone has a similar issue?

 

About 4-5 tabs max

 

Unfortunately one blackscreen has now happened but fortunately still not any BSOD.

 

The screen just goes black? What video drivers are you using?

 

Anyone know the thickness of the thermal pads for the VRAM on the 9550?????

I'd like to order new thermal pads with a higher W/mK adhead of time in preparation to purchase my

 

get at least 1,5mm

 

Damn my SSD is getting faster! lol

 

Yes, the screen just gets black and no cursor from the mouse appears. Keyboard lights up when pushing on the keys and machine still runs.
Drivers: Both Nvdia drivers tried - 1 which the machine was delivered with and the most recent from Nvidia´s website.
Intel HD is the one which automatically was installed during setup of windows I think.

Rgds
Watergate

 

Hi,
I know your issues and had them myself. I ended up reading a lot of threads at reddit and used some of their suggestions to solve this.
The problem is, that some processes of XTU aren`t stopped properly when going into sleep or shut down. To get rid of this, I use a script to kill the processes when shutting down or awake from sleep. I could mail you my tasks from windows taskscheduler (easy to import) as a xml file and my batch files as I don`t know how to attach files here. Just write me a pm.

Greetings,

Torben

 

Nah... to much work. I can deal with this problem. But thank you!

 

For those of you struggling to get a working system (no BSODs and no reboot issues) with AHCI, it seems everyone has tried RST drivers (perf issues/BSODs?), default Windows drivers (BSODs) and Samsung 950 Pro NVMe drivers (reboot issues) - but what about the advice in the first post of this thread:

If you don't use 32GB SSD cache drive or RAID, remove the Intel Rapid Storage Technology in Control Panel and install only AHCI drivers: 1) download latest Intel Rapid Storage Technology in a "f6flpy-x64.zip" variant 2) Extract the .zip package 3) Using system Device Manager manually update AHCI drivers only (iaAHCIC.inf and iaahcic.cat) under IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers in the Device Manager. [This will fix the issue number 6 and 7]

Anyone actually tried that? I need AHCI because I plan to dual boot with Linux, but I'm struggling to figure out the best approach to actually get that to work.

 

Dell informed that the only solution which relates to my problems (BSOD´s which I get no longer after installing Samsung NVme driver) and/or BLACK screens in which I still get (Machine gets a black screen including back lid but no mouse cursor and keyboard lid still on as well a machine running), is to replace PM951 SSD 1 TB drive + Replace the motherboard + Replace the Nvidia Graphic Card. They will do that tomorrow!

Kind regards
Watergate

 

FYI - Two days ago I decided to make another attempt at a dual boot setup (ubuntu 16.04), so I went the 1.1.19/ACHI/Samsung 950 Pro NVMe drivers route (there is no reboot issue with the 1.1.19 bios). Within a day I had a BSOD in windows... (I haven't used ubuntu in anger yet - but all the "bits" were working, including 5ghz wifi). I will give the intel drivers a whirl today...

 

Interesting - and a bit disheartening. That's the first I ever heard of still getting the disk BSODs related BSODs with the Samsung drivers. Did you explicity remove the Intel RST drivers? Did you reinstall Windows cleanly and was it in AHCI or RAID when you did the install?

The BSODs could also be unrelated to the disk, there were some comments that the newest Nvidia drivers had issues, etc. What was the text accompanying the BSOD if you remember? The disk ones have a couple characteristic messages - CRITICAL_PROCESS_DIED and KERNEL_INPAGE_ERROR IIRC.

 

Yes I made my own ISO with the boot drivers included and never have a BSOD apart from dodgy nvidia drivers, so i went to an older version.

Shows what a bunch of retards tech are, the video card is not a video card, it is part of the mainboard. You need to reject the repair as it is the same as replacing the entire system & ask a new system is sent unless they can prove the technician is factory trained and arrives with the proof + a service manual + correct anti static protection, thermal paste, cleaning solution and lint free cloth for the heatsink.

Best of luck them having one of the above list. If they are missing any of the above send them away and complain they are not fit to do the job before they make the laptop worst.

 

Right, I saw that - but are you using AHCI mode in the BIOS or do you have it on RAID?

 

Yes, you might be right however there must be something wrong with the hardware since I had problems from DAY 1 even though I used the preinstalled WIN10 version on RAID and used a complete new installed WIN10 on ACHI. So I could get lucky that the problem is motherboard+Nvidia Card integrated or not or SSD harddrive related. What else could it be?

Thank´s for paying attention

 

I use AHCI mode with the samsung 950 driver to start with but I swapped to windows driver as the samsung driver caused a long reboot.

Well the 1st thing to go wrong after that I would scream for a new build m8

 

Just checked the minidump and it was a:
PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA (which is not very helpful I know)... FYI I have switched back to AHCI and installed the intel " f6flpy-x64.zip" drivers (I did not uninstall the samsung NVMe controller drivers) - no BSOD today (but its only been half a day).

 

did you install "whocrashed" to see if it can throw up the driver to blame?

 

so avoid this laptop? Seems like a very long thread of problems

 

Your money, so only you can decide the answer to that question, but understand that people mostly post here to discuss issues, and those happy are far less often going to come here to talk about how wonderful everything is. What I mean is, if Dell sells 200 thousand XPS units, and only 400 people complain about them, then what about everyone else? My guess is, there are a ton of incredibly happy people who choose to not tinker with their machines and are completely satisfied with their purchase. Now I am not saying everything comes out of the box working 100% every single time, but the smart money says most machines don't have issues if you don't go looking for them. So avoid it? I say hell no. This is a wonderful machine that is incredibly well built, looks sexy, and performs well. If you absolutely must tinker with it not stop to get the absolute highest benchmarks, then perhaps there are better machines. Just my 2 cents.

 

let me put this away.
Most of the issues were fixed with updates. Now I only have the sleep bug when using RAID, but since I changed to AHCI and using Samsung NVMe drivers I have no problems.

 

What sleep issues were you having on RAID? I'm thinking of clean installing and don't know what drivers to install after and if I should use RAID or AHCI.

 

Only reason to have raid is with 2 drives installed, one being a cache drive.

 

Well a big reason, at least until recently, was that AHCI mode would cause BSODs or various issues that RAID wouldn't. That seems to be less of an issue with the Samsung drivers, but some users here are still reporting it.

 

not me, windows drivers, ahci & a pro 950.

next systems due in a week and that will have the 1tb drive so we will see if that system gets it.

 

No one had it with 950 Pro. I'm only talking about the majority of users with the stock PM951.

 

The sequential speeds of the SSD are cut by half after sleep....800mb/s still very fast but its not the 1700 or 1800 you get normally. The drivers you need to install are on the dell website. I recommend AHCI since the system fells faster and with the Samsung NVMe drivers and don't get any BSOD anymore.

 

On Wed 17/02/2016 12:55:41 GMT your computer crashed
crash dump file: C:\WINDOWS\Minidump\021716-11109-01.dmp
This was probably caused by the following module: win32kbase.sys (win32kbase!EnterSharedCrit+0x3A)
Bugcheck code: 0x50 (0xFFFFF961CE451C0A, 0x10, 0xFFFFF961CE451C0A, 0x2)
Error: PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA
file path: C:\WINDOWS\system32\win32kbase.sys
product: Microsoft® Windows® Operating System
company: Microsoft Corporation
description: Base Win32k Kernel Driver
Bug check description: This indicates that invalid system memory has been referenced.
This appears to be a typical software driver bug and is not likely to be caused by a hardware problem.
The crash took place in a standard Microsoft module. Your system configuration may be incorrect. Possibly this problem is caused by another driver on your system that cannot be identified at this time.

Not very helpful - but no BSOD after day 1 of ACHI + Samsung Driver + Intel IDE Driver...

 

The sequential speeds of the SSD are cut by half after sleep....800mb/s still very fast but its not the 1700 or 1800 you get normally. The drivers you need to install are on the dell website. I recommend AHCI since the system fells faster and with the Samsung NVMe drivers

 

When I take the bottom off the laptop is there a particular side I should remove first?
I've read a few people saying its easier to pull the back up first and unclip the sides carefully...

 

I started off at the back right hand side with the laptop upside down and used a little plastic pry tool that looks like a guitar plectrum. Its tight at first but be persistant and it eventually lets go once you work around its sides.

 

Thanks man! Will try that method once I get it! I'll be changing out the thermal pads, adding additional heatsinks to the VRM, and repasting the CPU and GPU with CLU!

 

Thanks man! Will try that method once I get it! I'll be changing out the thermal pads, adding additional heatsinks to the VRM, and repasting the CPU and GPU with CLU!

 

Hi Watergate, didn't you say that Dell would be replacing some of your hardware to solve the black screen issue?

 

Yes, however the replacement is delayed at least one week due to no parts on stock and therefore I took the chance once again and tried but my mission failed.

Rgds
Watergate

 

I also noticed the nvme sleeping bug.
- If i set up the samsung NVME drivers and set AHCI in bios, this should be gone BUT i've seen some threads/comments with a lot of BSOD and trouble after this setup...can anyone confirm that?

 

Hey guys, since I decided not to buy the XPS 15 9550 and get Surface Book instead, is there anyone who would like to take care of the first post? I'm afraid I won't be able to follow this thread in the near future. If there is anyone who would like to seriously take care of the first post, please PM me.