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Comment by oulu2006 | Hacker News Reader

oulu2006

Very true, the previous XPS 15 had huge problems with the Killer NIC card because the drivers for it took months to stabilise and its only recently been that a driver update has made the Wifi somewhat stable and the machine has stopped crashing every few days.

What other people seem to have done is get Dell to swap the Killer NIC with an Intel one which has much better driver support.

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I'll never buy a latest gen XPS ever again. I bought my wife the latest and greatest XPS last year (Cyber Monday) and it had the most ridiculous problems. For example, WiFi would randomly disconnect, Chrome couldn't play Netflix (what?), internet speeds were an order of magnitude slower than my Chromebook, etc.

I fixed the issues by swapping with an Intel card (didn't want to have to wait months for driver updates), but in my opinion that is unacceptable for a premium laptop. Why is Dell skimping on parts? I paid $1500 precisely because I didn't want to deal with crappy parts, but instead they took my $1500 and gave me a worse browsing experience than my $150 Chromebook...

I hate how prevalent Killer NIC chips have become. They seem to be racing to the bottom with cheap wireless and ethernet PHYs with crappy drivers, yet their reputation hasn't quite caught up. Their marketing brands them as premium and a lot of manufacturers still buy into it to target the "gaming" segment (which also hates them).

I refuse to buy any board which has these chips and will pay a small premium for an Intel or Realtek instead.

I don't recall anybody ever having a kind word to say about them. As I recall the product used to be the cheapest Atheros chips the vendor could find plus a proprietary driver that was snake oil and bugs. Not better than a Realtek and worse in a lot of cases. I suspect that they're actually cheaper than a Realtek, which is why they keep showing on consumer hardware.

HardOCP liked them at one point: https://m.hardocp.com/article/2011/09/08/gaming_killer_nic/2

I always thought of them as purveyors of snake oil and reached for Intel NICs with great results every time. I used to like Atheros for radios back in the good old bad days of WEP and MadWifi.

Colleague recently bought one of these, has a Killer NIC, still not stable, machine hard crashes every time they boot a VM.

Intel card is the one recommended. Even Dell uses it in Linux pre-installed version of XPS.

I don't know what these guys are doing but even in Windows, I would get IRQ_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL after deep sleep.

FYI: Don't use the killer drivers, let windows install it's own driver.

My experience with a similar (fully maxed out 9560, but no touch display). Since updating the drivers, the killer card has been working without fail, though it was a little frustrating to deal with a brand new laptop that constantly blue screened and failed to connect to wireless when my 10year old macbook sitting at the same desk was fine. Reddit has a good guide for setting it up, though some of these are now out-of-date. https://www.reddit.com/r/Dell/comments/5unlmb/got_my_brand_n...

If you don't want to bother with dealing with Dell, they do provide official repair guides on their site telling you exactly how to do it. I bought the prior generation of the XPS 13, and for $25, an Intel 7625 wifi card. Took me about 20 minutes to swap it out.

There are a lot of reports of killer drivers causing issues. My friend needed help with his Alienware 15 because it started instantly blue screening as the login screen came up at every boot. Dell's only solution was a factory reset. I dug into it and a release of the official killer wifi drivers was bugged. They had to be disabled to actually boot. They couldn't be uninstalled or upgraded in safe mode because they use the Windows installed doesn't run in safe mode.

>They couldn't be uninstalled or upgraded in safe mode //

Isn't this entirely broken, surely no one designed it so you couldn't fix applications in safe-mode?

You can enable and disable drivers and startup functionality in safe mode. You can't install or uninstall any apps or drivers that utilize Windows Installer as the service isn't running, rendering the install/uninstall/modify abilities of those apps and drivers useless. You can still install and uninstall apps and drivers that use proper installers like NSIS, etc.

OK, so "Windows Installer" is a third party app? Why's it a service; surely it only needs to run when initiated as part of an install/upgrade/uninstall rather than perpetually?

It's not a third party app. It's the thing that Windows uses to install things.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Installer

They're right though. It doesn't run in safe mode and it's a fucking pain in the ass. Makes fixing issues harder when you can't uninstall shit in safemode. Drivers especially.

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