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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.  



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