Hi.
My XPS 15 came with a Toshiba SSD and I'm attempting to understand how it could be that the newer XPS 15, with faster and newer CPU could be so much slower than my older Gigabyte Aero 14.
Doing a video conversion shows that the XPS 15 is much faster than the Aero 14, by about 20% (pure software conversion).
Yet, when I compile the project I'm working on: almost everything identical the Aero 14 takes 24 minutes while the XPS 15 takes 38 minutes.
Changing the BIOS SATA from the default RAID to AHCI shows the time drops to 28 minutes, which is much better but still slower. (Why would dell use RAID by default for a NVMe drive, that disables all the NVMe goodness such as queues and cache)
The only difference I could think of was that I put a 512GB Samsung 950Pro in the Aero 14, so I took that SSD and put it in the Dell.
After installing all the drivers, I found that the XPS would become unresponsive after about 20 minutes. The mouse cursor would still be working, the capslock working (so I know the kernel hasn't crashed). Even hovering the mouse over the Windows logo in the bottom left corner would make it change colour.
Yet, everything else isn't responsive. Can't select a window, can't switch app, ctrl-alt-del does nothing.
So I erased the 950Pro and restored the system from zero using the Dell XPS recovery drive.
Even after restoring and setting everything as new, I continued to experience the same problem: after about 20 minutes the laptop becomes unresponsive...
BIOS has been updated to the latest version (1.1.3). This is both with the BIOS sete to AHCI or RAID mode.
Any ideas on why that could be the case?
Thanks in advance
PS: When you restore from the Dell recovery partition, make sure you put back the BIOS into RAID mode, otherwise it starts rebooting in a loop forever.