SSD woes
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So, you've paid for the licensed version of Windows 10 that you're blowing away
You have never done this - have you? :) No. You do not blow away the license you paid for. My precise procedure for a new machine is: 1. Unpack the machine and hook up monitors, keyboards, etc. 2. Connect network cable so the OEM Windows 10 gets registered with Microsoft as soon as I turn on power and register with Microsoft using my MS account. (A MS account is nice but NOT essential.) 3. Turn machine off. That's it. Windows 10 is now registered for that machine with MS for ever. 4. Replace the system drive (if you wish). It has no effect on the machine's MS license. 5. Using Diskpart clean and repartition the system drive. 6. Using a Windows 10 installation tool that is a free download from MS, do a clean install on the newly partitioned system drive. This step takes 15 or so minutes if your system drive is a good NVMe SSD. Once again you may or may not opt to use your MS account and password. 7. When the first clean version of Windows is up and running, check Windows activation in Control Panel >> System. You will see that Windows 10 is activated! 8. Then I usually do the Windows updates that can take a while. Try it if you ever buy an OEM in the future. It works! Yes, you need to be computer savvy to mess with disk partitions, etc. For this reason I get called in whenever a family member scores a new machine. I enjoy helping. By the way: Diskpart is a dangerous tool in the hands of the inexperienced. Research it well before using it, to avoid disasters!
Right. I wasn't sure if you were completing the process of getting the system activated first with the OEM version, and *then* blowing it away. You're right, if you let it go through that process first, then yeah, the "free" installer from the MS site will recognize the system as already activated with that license. It does means however it's lot more time-consuming than it needs to be - by the time everything is said and done, Windows has been set up twice. Plus the download time (a 4GB+ download in my case is a roughly 2-hour endeavor). At least you can hang on to the ISO...
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So her computer started having all kinds of issues, including BIOS misbehaving. The computer was getting quite old and I did not fancy regular maintenance work to keep it going. Her birthday is early in the new year and so I bought her a new Dell as combined Christmas and birthday gift. I paid a little extra to get her a machine with a NVMe M.2 SSD. One of the first items I checked was the speed of the M.2 SSD. I was very disappointed. Dell had supplied the machine with a SSD that ran barely faster than clunky old SATA SSDs. In fact the sequential read speed was slightly slower than her old SATA SSD. I ordered a new Samsung 970 Pro M.2 SSD and used it to replace the item supplied by Dell. What a difference! Sequential read speed was about 5 times that of traditional Samsung SATA SSDs. Random read speeds were also much faster, but not quite 5 times. Now I sit with a M.2 SSD that Dell supplied, that is of no further use to me! I am a little disappointed in Dell.
Did you try just reseating the Dell M.2? If it worked, fine, if not, it would only take 5 min. In the past, I would have wiped the disk and reloaded Win10 from scratch. Did you do that when you installed the new SSD or did you clone? Lots of variables there.
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Right. I wasn't sure if you were completing the process of getting the system activated first with the OEM version, and *then* blowing it away. You're right, if you let it go through that process first, then yeah, the "free" installer from the MS site will recognize the system as already activated with that license. It does means however it's lot more time-consuming than it needs to be - by the time everything is said and done, Windows has been set up twice. Plus the download time (a 4GB+ download in my case is a roughly 2-hour endeavor). At least you can hang on to the ISO...
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Did you try just reseating the Dell M.2? If it worked, fine, if not, it would only take 5 min. In the past, I would have wiped the disk and reloaded Win10 from scratch. Did you do that when you installed the new SSD or did you clone? Lots of variables there.
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Did you try just reseating the Dell M.2?
Yes. I even used an adapter to plug it into X4 connector of the PCIexpress bus. That killed the BIOS! The BIOS wouldn't start. This same adapter works just fine today in the same X4 slot, with a Samsung M.2 item mounted. There is definitely something very screwy with the M.2 unit supplied by Dell. (This second unit in the X4 slot is her data drive.) I never clone drives. I always install a new, clean instance of Windows. Just between you and me: I rather enjoy doing a fresh Windows install. Yeah. Some people call me weird! :laugh:
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So her computer started having all kinds of issues, including BIOS misbehaving. The computer was getting quite old and I did not fancy regular maintenance work to keep it going. Her birthday is early in the new year and so I bought her a new Dell as combined Christmas and birthday gift. I paid a little extra to get her a machine with a NVMe M.2 SSD. One of the first items I checked was the speed of the M.2 SSD. I was very disappointed. Dell had supplied the machine with a SSD that ran barely faster than clunky old SATA SSDs. In fact the sequential read speed was slightly slower than her old SATA SSD. I ordered a new Samsung 970 Pro M.2 SSD and used it to replace the item supplied by Dell. What a difference! Sequential read speed was about 5 times that of traditional Samsung SATA SSDs. Random read speeds were also much faster, but not quite 5 times. Now I sit with a M.2 SSD that Dell supplied, that is of no further use to me! I am a little disappointed in Dell.
Dell and all the major commodity PC vendors use the lowest spec components they can get away with. It is the nature of the beast. If you want the best performance, you will end up building your own PC and it wont be cheap.
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Dell and all the major commodity PC vendors use the lowest spec components they can get away with. It is the nature of the beast. If you want the best performance, you will end up building your own PC and it wont be cheap.
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a 4GB+ download in my case is a roughly 2-hour endeavor
Ouch! But if you create the install tool you only need to do the download once- right?
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Did you try just reseating the Dell M.2?
Yes. I even used an adapter to plug it into X4 connector of the PCIexpress bus. That killed the BIOS! The BIOS wouldn't start. This same adapter works just fine today in the same X4 slot, with a Samsung M.2 item mounted. There is definitely something very screwy with the M.2 unit supplied by Dell. (This second unit in the X4 slot is her data drive.) I never clone drives. I always install a new, clean instance of Windows. Just between you and me: I rather enjoy doing a fresh Windows install. Yeah. Some people call me weird! :laugh:
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Did you try just reseating the Dell M.2?
Yes. I even used an adapter to plug it into X4 connector of the PCIexpress bus. That killed the BIOS! The BIOS wouldn't start. This same adapter works just fine today in the same X4 slot, with a Samsung M.2 item mounted. There is definitely something very screwy with the M.2 unit supplied by Dell. (This second unit in the X4 slot is her data drive.) I never clone drives. I always install a new, clean instance of Windows. Just between you and me: I rather enjoy doing a fresh Windows install. Yeah. Some people call me weird! :laugh:
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OK. But how do you determine the quality of major components, like the main board, that you buy in the retail market? :confused:
AnandTech is a good resource.
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AnandTech is a good resource.
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So her computer started having all kinds of issues, including BIOS misbehaving. The computer was getting quite old and I did not fancy regular maintenance work to keep it going. Her birthday is early in the new year and so I bought her a new Dell as combined Christmas and birthday gift. I paid a little extra to get her a machine with a NVMe M.2 SSD. One of the first items I checked was the speed of the M.2 SSD. I was very disappointed. Dell had supplied the machine with a SSD that ran barely faster than clunky old SATA SSDs. In fact the sequential read speed was slightly slower than her old SATA SSD. I ordered a new Samsung 970 Pro M.2 SSD and used it to replace the item supplied by Dell. What a difference! Sequential read speed was about 5 times that of traditional Samsung SATA SSDs. Random read speeds were also much faster, but not quite 5 times. Now I sit with a M.2 SSD that Dell supplied, that is of no further use to me! I am a little disappointed in Dell.
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So her computer started having all kinds of issues, including BIOS misbehaving. The computer was getting quite old and I did not fancy regular maintenance work to keep it going. Her birthday is early in the new year and so I bought her a new Dell as combined Christmas and birthday gift. I paid a little extra to get her a machine with a NVMe M.2 SSD. One of the first items I checked was the speed of the M.2 SSD. I was very disappointed. Dell had supplied the machine with a SSD that ran barely faster than clunky old SATA SSDs. In fact the sequential read speed was slightly slower than her old SATA SSD. I ordered a new Samsung 970 Pro M.2 SSD and used it to replace the item supplied by Dell. What a difference! Sequential read speed was about 5 times that of traditional Samsung SATA SSDs. Random read speeds were also much faster, but not quite 5 times. Now I sit with a M.2 SSD that Dell supplied, that is of no further use to me! I am a little disappointed in Dell.
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All that work and then Windows does not really install itself very well
What work? - it's an easy process. And Windows installs very well as I do it. I love Windows!
Hi Cp-Coder, Excuse me. I thought you said clean install which entails reinstalling applications, settings, customising,etc.,as far as I know. Please share your easy process if your are indeed doing a clean install. I'm curious. Have I been unawarely doing all this extra work for the last 30 years?
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This (and the original slow SSD) takes me back to when I was managing a small group of 50 computers. We were obliged by Corporate to switch to Dell and I started to see really weird performance differences between different, but similar, models - some being slower than the old PCs they had replaced. I called in Dell and the technician who came swapped out the motherboards in the 'slow' units - suddenly they ran normally. When I asked what the problem was the answer was rather shocking... "Often they discover that there is instability or lockups due to errors in m/b design and chipset implementation. To remedy this they often insert enforced wait cycles in the CPU or slow it (or the bus) down and fudge the bios to falsely report correct speeds. If the client doesn't complain they leave it be and if they do they get a corrected m/b" This smells as bad as the VW emissions scandal, but it was more than 10 years ago so I'm not in any way suggesting that things like this are still happening today. Incidentally we never saw that particular technician again.
Was his name Tuttle, and did he look like Robert DeNiro?
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Hi Cp-Coder, Excuse me. I thought you said clean install which entails reinstalling applications, settings, customising,etc.,as far as I know. Please share your easy process if your are indeed doing a clean install. I'm curious. Have I been unawarely doing all this extra work for the last 30 years?
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I was obviously referring to the process of installing the operating system. Yes, you still have to do your apps subsequently.
Well I guess, in all good will, what we said was not obvious to the other. In my experience, W10 requires quite a bit of tuning, unless MS's defaults suit you. Having said that, I find that W10 is the the best job Microsoft has done so far. The annoyances are generally to a minimum.
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Well I guess, in all good will, what we said was not obvious to the other. In my experience, W10 requires quite a bit of tuning, unless MS's defaults suit you. Having said that, I find that W10 is the the best job Microsoft has done so far. The annoyances are generally to a minimum.
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W10 requires quite a bit of tuning, unless MS's defaults suit you
Yes indeed! I have a list of items that I fine tune after the install. Some are trivial, like adding a seconds output to the clock. Others are a little more involved, like moving the Windows Temp folders to another internal drive. My reason for doing this is to avoid temp files from bloating up Macrium images of the systems drive, etc. etc. But my point was that I enjoy doing all this, and helping family members with their computers.
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Clear throat...Read the specs, research, etc before purchasing ANYTHING. Hell, even service manuals are available online. What else can I say.
When you order your computer online from Dell, like I do, you can configure the machine within tight bounds. For example: For my wife's machine, I could choose between a spinning disk drive or a NVMe S.2 SSD. Make and type of the drive was not stated. They tell you the drive's capacity, but not the make or model. Take it or leave it. I chose the slightly more expensive M.2 drive knowing that I may not get the fastest, more expensive SSD option, but at least the main board was guaranteed to have a S.2 connector and the bios was guaranteed to work with NVMe SSDs. I was disappointed because the SSD Dell supplied was so painfully slow. However, the extra money I spent to replace the slow SSD with a superfast Samsung 970 PRO unit was well spent.