Windows 10 Pro is causing driver and startup problems in Dell 7720

Hello Everyone.

This is one long query. And I believe other people are facing similar problem too. I hope I get my answers.

I just upgraded from Windows 8.1 Professional to Windows 10 Professional. I have installed each and every update from Windows Update as well as Dell Updates.

And I've been facing some issues from day one.

Whenever I restart my windows, The Windows Explorer crashes and restarts when I try to open the Notifications, Wi-fi Networking, Battery or Start Menu. (I'm not taking about Internet Explorer. I'm talking about the Windows Explorer the one with Start Menu and taskbar and the whole GUI) It crashes, everything closes, and then the explorer rebuilds itself and things get back to normal. But again, it happens. So I keep opening the start menu and let it crash and restart about 4-5 times until it gets stable. Then it works fine afterwards.

At first i thought it was because I was running RapidStart and RapidStorage technology (using my 32GB SSD as caching drive). So I disabled the cache, set the SSD to offline and uninstalled both RapidStart and RapidStorage. They were not helping out anyway because even with caching enabled, the Windows 10 startup was far slower than Windows 8.1 without SSD caching.

But disabling the SSD didn't help at all. Explorer still crashed. Nothing Changed. So I enabled the SSD again, reinstalled those programs back and nothing changed.

The applications of SSD programs (Intel Rapid Start and Intel Rapid Storage) showed that everything is fine, everything is enabled and the booting Hard Disk is being accelerated. Its just that there is no practical benefit.

Another issue is when copying files from one Hard Disk to another Hard Disk (not different drives within same HDD, I'm talking about two separate physical Hard Disk Drives - one accelerated by SSD and one not). The copying speed in Windows 8.1 was around 200-300 MB/sec for small files up to 1GB and 80-90 MB/sec for larger ones.

But in Windows 10, they're reduced to 60-70 MB/sec initially, and then the speed drops down to mere 18-19 MB/sec. It's as if the HDD is constantly under too much load even with the SSD caching enabled.

Only thing that SSD caching does in Windows 10 is speed up opening of application after I've opened them once. For example, once I open the Photoshop and close it, it will open much faster next time.

But Windows Booting, Windows Startup, Logging in... they all take so much time as if i'm using a decade old 4500rpm Hard Disk. In Windows 8.1 it was much faster (just below a minute without the SSD, and with the SSD enabled, windows started up within seconds).

So I tried uninstalling the SSD Drivers (RapidStart and RapidStorage). RapidStart was uninstalled fine, but I couldn't uninstall Rapid Storage. It gave me the error: There is a pending reboot for this product.

I tried rebooting and uninstalling but it didn't work. I tried disabling SSD and reset to available, even cleaned the SSD using Diskpart, but still couldn't uninstall it. So I used RevoUninstaller. It removed all the files and registry items manually.

Then, I download the latest drivers from Intel Download Center for Windows 10 (not from Dell, they don't have new SATA drivers for Windows 10 yet), but i cannot install them now. I open the setup file and it gives same error: There is a pending reboot for this product.

Please help me out. My laptop has gotten too slow after Windows 10 upgrade.

Specifications for my laptop:

Intel 3rd Gen i7 CPU | 8GB DDR3 RAM | nVidia 650M GT (3D stereoscopic 120Hz display), 2GB GDD5 | 32GB mSATA caching SSD + 1TB HDD (accelerated) + 1TB HDD