Skip to main content

Dell XPs15 9500 rant - and Killer networking

 well i bought a new laptop.  For most of my career i have been working on the road so had an appropriate laptop for lugging around, with all the RAM/CPU sacrifices that that entails.  The last couple of years I've been more home-based due to my role, so finally decided to pony-up and buy myself an XPS15 9500.

£2500 is not an unsubstantial purchase but i was pretty confident in it.  Reviews were good, 32GB ram means finally Teams isnt eating all my RAM up (thanks MS) and it arrived.


Within 6 weeks it had had a catastrophic failure of the MOBO.  I have full next day support so an engineer arrived and replaced all the inner workings of the machine (!) and all appeared well.  


However since then this machine has been a nightmare.  The network card inside is Killer AX1650 and it "should" be grand.  However:

- it syncs to my network slower than 4-5year old machines (c.100-300Mb/s)

- it drops packets all over the place, which is a real issue when your a home worker (it always seems to happen when i am asked a question on Teams calls too, which is typical!  Like it knows!)

- Bluetooth is also AWFUL - to the point that at times i cannot use a bluetooth keyboard because you end up with wooooooooooooooooooooooooooordsssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss likeeeeeeeeeee tttttttttttttttthis.....................


Just a reminder - £2,500!!!

I had another mobo replacement (wifi chip is soldered on!) to try and fix it with no change whatsoever.


Currently i am on my third support case with Del and am 3 weeks in.  Having been told by Killer to install THEIR drivers and found no improvement, Dell told me i shouldnt do this so we put back their drivers (no change) and Dell then told me to "try the Killer drivers".... 

**screams into the void** 


I know what comes next - go through the Killer "diagnostic" document and try all 15 steps on trying to fix it, which include:

- setting preference for either 2.4 or 5ghz - why would i do that??

- messing around with driver config settings

- uninstalling drivers, cleaning them out completely and reinstalling - been there, done that (twice)

I have also been down the Killer "support" route which normally involves

- raising case

- wait a week

- get told to do a clean install of new drivers

- feed back issue still there

- wait a week

- get told to do a clean install of new drivers released that week

- and repeat ad infinitum

Between Dell and Killer they have really messed my machine up.  



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

TPG Apps Highlights - Risk Matrix #projectonline #projectserver #risk

This post is the first of a series to highlight the apps available for Project Server and Project Online from the SharePoint store  ( https://store.office.com/search.aspx?productgroup=SharePoint&qu=tpg ) and direct via your local TPG office. The first of this series will look at the s imple plug-and-play apps that all users of Project Online can make use of quickly and easily.   T hese are: Risk Matrix  Milestone Trend Analysis (MTA) WBS Chart viewer Next we will focus on the challenge of  Resource Request Supply and Demand by demonstrating our more recent TeamLink and TeamManager apps. Team Manager App is a Resource Manager/Owner app for allocating resource supply to Projects and BAU activities and monitoring demands against commitments Team Link App is a PM tool for monitoring Project demands vs the supply provided by the Resource Managers  Finally I will highlight some of the benefits of our integration tools when used in the context of Project Online
Post a Comment
Read more

Restoring PWA Site to another Web App in the same Farm

The scenario is this: SharePoint 2016 Farm with Project Server Two Web Apps Development UAT One PWA on Development Web App. I want to copy the PWA Site on Development web app to UAT to support a testing cycle. As far as I knew there were two options: 1) Content Database Restore and Attach Process would be backup your Dev Content Database, Restore to a new Content Database for QA, then mount the database on the appropriate web app and your off.... Problem:  Although you can do this with the -AssignNewDatabaseID switch in Powershell (to avoid two content db's having the same database id) the Site Collection (PWA) in the db still retains its SiteID which means there is a duplicate SiteID in the Configuration Database.  This stops the PWA site being created and alllocated correctly and becomes essentially orphaned. This method is only any good for MOVING not COPYING Back to the drawing board... 2) Backup-SPSite / Restore-SPSite I didn't believe this w
1 comment
Read more

Migration Project Server (2010 to 2019) Issue 1 - Upgrading from 2013 to 2016 - Error encountered while migrating project data in Content database. The instance of the SQL Server Database Engine cannot obtain a LOCK resource at this time. Rerun your statement when there are fewer active users

I was intending to write a set of posts on the topic of migrating SharePoint and Project Server from 2010 on premise through 2013, 2016 to 2019 Azure, using SQL Managed Instance as the backend SQL Service.  This set of posts are still getting drafted and updated as we move through this cycle, but I came across a huge blocker this week that I wanted to post on, whilst it was fresh. Our Azure migration machines (2013 and 2016) are: - dual core 2.3ghz - 28GB Ram 2013 server is Windows Server 2012 R2 running SQL 2012 SP1 2016 server is Windows Server 2016 running SQL 2014 SP1 The Project Server dataset we are dealing with here is c.100GB (50% archive data). The uplift from SP/PS 2010 to 2013 went without a hitch over a 2.5hr period which was a huge win.  However when attempting to upgrade to 2016 we hit a hitch. Firstly some background:  When you perform the Migrate-SPProjectDatabase command, the following will happen (well it certainly did to us) - the ProjectWebApp DB fro
1 comment
Read more