Dell Xps 15 9550 performances AFTER clean W10 Install & drivers update

Hi,
I'll perform a clean install tonight. I think it might be very usefull if we all post a performance report after:
1. bios update
2. clean install
3. update all drivers
Especially for people pondering to buy or keep or return their 9550. In my opinion, special focus should be on:
1. Battery life
2. Screen flickering / color shifting problems
3. NVMe performances and RAID/AHCI / NVMe settings
4. Booting/loading times (I'm experiencing slow downs probably due to cpu/gpu/ssd drivers)
Share your experience!

 

Honestly, with a super-fast SSD, you're not going to notice any real difference between a clean install, or just uninstalling the dell bloatware.

You're not going to notice any appreciable difference in any of the areas you mentioned (battery life, screen image quality, SSD speed, etc). Even boot times won't be noticeable, because whatever few seconds you shave off with a clean install won't ever be noticed unless you intentionally time it.

However, the one big advantage of a clean install is that you get to clean up all of the Dell Recovery partitions on your drive. If you know how to do a clean windows install and rebuild your software config, then you don't need recovery partitions. And by doing that, you can reclaim about 30GB of space that Dell allocated for that.

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Thanks for your reply, have you done a clean install?
I'm not only talking about speed performances but general usage: for instance, with dell drivers for intel gpu if you try to install the new drivers released by intel windows says you already have the best drivers even if they are not.
Anyhow, if you actually did a clean install on an updated bios can you tell if you experiences a reduction in some of the known problems that you might have experienced before?
thanks

 

Can you remove the Dell recovery portion without clean install? Like you boot into Windows install screen and delete the partition and then reboot back to Windows?

 

Technically, yes. But the amount of work you need to do it, and have a bootable windows installation afterwards, isn't worth the effort.

You literally save time by doing a clean install than trying to delete a recovery partition. And that is even with the assumption that you know exactly what you are doing, and know exactly how to troubleshoot.

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You aren't going to notice any performance difference with updated drivers or bios. Drivers don't work like that. You don't get performance boosts by installing new drivers (with the exception of gaming GPU drivers that are optimized for newly released games. But this does not apply to intel gpus).

As for tips.... Go into bios. Disable secure boot, and go into legacy boot mode. Otherwise, you will not be able to boot off of a USB flash drive to do your windows install.

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I guess the only real useful dell app is the premier colour thing, which I can see a noticeable difference when switching different profiles.

 

You could do that, yes. But all it does is switch monitor color calibration profiles.

If you want to replicate the benefit of that, then just download someone's calibrated color profile that they uploaded for this laptop. Look for sRGB or Adobe RGB color calibrated profiles, and you should be good to go.


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Are you sure about this? I just deleted my recovery partitions with diskpart and haven't had any issues, on the XPS 13; took about a minute.

Here's a guide:
jaredheinrichs.com/how-to-delete-oem-partition.html

 

Hmm, with clean install and the removal of premier-color, which profile would XPS15 defaults to after i install Intel and Nvidia drivers? Wide gamut or standard gamut?

 

The article you listed doesn't actually do anything with practical benefit. You want to delete OEM / Recovery partitions to reclaim that as usable drive space. The guide you listed simply deletes the partition, but does not help you reclaim that space as usable storage space.

To give you an idea, trying to do it your way (non-destructive partition resizing) will require you to: find a partition resizing tool; delete OEM / Recovery partition; resize main OS partition.

That sounds nice and easy, but there are a TON of things that can go wrong. Your new resized partition may not be 4K cluster aligned, which will degrade SSD performance. You may have an invalid bootloader, because it is trying to now boot off of an invalid partition (because you changed the number / order of partitions on that drive). You may run into a problem where the partition resizing tool can't read M.2 SSDs, or PCIe / NVMe SSDs. You may run into a problem where something goes wrong, and you lose all your data. If any of those things go wrong, you need to immediately be able to diagnose the issue, and know the resolution. When you get into a situation where you're doing major drive operations like that, any small mistake or error could wipe your drive and leave you with an unusable system.

So I say just avoid all the risk of something going wrong (and wasted time, which may result in doing a clean Windows re-install anyway) and just do a clean Windows re-install. This is especially true for a clean / new laptop, where you don't have any user data that you care about preserving.

Plus, you get the added benefit of being a super-nerd, and doing a Windows install just to see how fast and awesome your new hardware is. Personally, I actually enjoy doing clean Windows installs on new hardware, just to see how fast it can go.

 

You can just do that with Windows's own Disk Management tool though, since it's basically empty space after the main partitions. But you're right, one should of course have some basic knowledge and troubleshooting skills. At any rate, even just deleting the partitions is probably a good idea, since SSDs potentially profit from over provisioning.

 

Hi, update all drivers with Dell drivers or Win10 drivers only?

 

I can confirm what didsip mentioned. It is possible to non-destructively remove the recovery partitions within windows, no special apps required. I deleted both mine (852 MB + 11.53 GB) then reclaimed space to the C drive. There were no ill effects and it took all of 2 minutes. A clean install isn't needed unless you want to of course, each to his/her own preference.

 

I just clean install and i noticed the PCH temps are down by 10 celsius!
I think Dell or Mcafee bloatware is stressing the PCH for nothing.

Btw, do not delete the smaller 852MB partition. I learnt the hard way, that partition is needed if you want to reset your PC inside windows. With that gone, i cannot do so and had to clean install from bios, which was rather troublesome because i needed to swap around my USB stick because of some known bug with 'media drivers not found".

 

After initial boot the first thing I did was remove extra apps and mcafee. Re partitions: I had no need for them as I use 3rd party imaging solution with it's own recovery usb windows tools. So the partitions were useless to me, tho I did image the original partitions just in case. 26 years in the IT field I'm used to fixing systems should they break. Everyone's needs are different

 

EDIT: nvm.

 

I was going nuts because of this suggestion. I thought I was doing something wrong that prevents me from installing the Win 10. You wont be able to install the Windows 10 with this partition not deleted.

 

double post

 

I've been using the laptop for a few days now after bios update + clean install + manual drivers (except from intel graphics, kept the dell release) PM951 in RAID mode.
The laptop does work better: no sys error, no screen flickering, somewhat improved battery life (i can get up to 6.5 hours now). Although I decided to still send it back: the palmprint issue with the carbonfiber body is a realone to me: the feeling of the material is very good but the aspect is just hugly, cannot really stand it.

 

So to do a clean install, will it do any harm if I first delete ALL partitions using my boot based partitioning software? Will the W10 installation USB create all the partitions it needs? I have never understood what all the smaller partitions do (other than the recovery one).

 

Those other partitions are part of Win10 and you can delete all those (except the recovery one - Dell created) because Win10 will auto create all the partitions needed.

On a side note, I would suggest to delay your Win10 fresh install due to the BIOS 1.1.15 update compatibility. I noticed the other guys who didn't do Win10 clean install managed to find a workaround but not on my clean install system.

 

What do you mean 1.1.15 update compatibility with a fresh install? I had no issues installing 1.1.15 on my fresh win10 install. I've never even powered on the 1tb hdd that came with the system.

 

If you check the other thread you will see there are several people having issue after the update. Are you on RAID or AHCI?

 

ACHI, which other thread?

 

I see. Good for you then. You are the fist person to claim no issue after BIOS 1.1.15 update especially on AHCI mode. Check the 9550 owners lounge

 

Interesting, maybe because I have a 950 pro and not the stock XPS SSD. I just tried rebooting 10 times and didn't have one issue.

 

I still have a recovery partition left after a clean install of windows 10 when i view in disk management. Actually there are two named Healthy (Recovery Partition), and Healthy (EFI System Partition). I am pretty sure I removed all the disks with the new install..

Is there a way to get rid of these? Thank you