Windows 10 on the Dell XPS 27

By | December 18, 2015

If you’ve been putting this off because Dell say it’s not supported fear not. The only gotcha I have found is a simple one to fix. Two issues actually but they are related. I’d also suggest a clean install if you can. I tried an upgrade and while it worked I would not recommend it.

The first problem I had was that with Windows 8.1 from the Dell recovery partition Windows loaded in well under 10 seconds but was taking 30-45 seconds or so with Windows 10. The second after waking from sleeping it would consistently blue screen with a ntfs.sys error.

bsod

So, while looking for info about the BSOD I found this video and started to follow the instructions.

but then when I got to the second part realized that the Intel software was not installed. Got that here https://downloadcenter.intel.com/download/25165 then cleared the cache and re-enabled it, after 2 re-boots each one got faster, eventually getting down to about 5 seconds, happy happy 🙂

So I learnt a few things tonight about Intel® Rapid Storage Technology and getting my Dell XPS to boot in < 6 seconds on average when it was taking about 30-40 seconds. Turns out the SSD cache was corrupted when I did a clean install of Win 10 that did not install all the preinstalled Dell software (ie no upgrade)

Basically whats inside my Dell XPS is 32Gb of Samsung SSD and a 2Tb Seagate Barracuda, in the BIOS you can set the SSD as a cache or as just another drive. When set as a cache it eventually caches on the SSD all the most used files, it’s most obvious at boot though even to logon is much quicker.

I have not found anything else that doesn’t work, been about 2 months now like this without a problem.

HTH

 

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