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XPS 15 9500 Wifi Issue
Hello
Please can someone urgently help. I have purchased a near £3000 laptop and the wifi speed is nothing short of appalling. Sometimes I can get 'normal' speed (after a re-start or disconnecting and re-connecting) but most of the time it runs at about 0.04 to 1.2mbs. This is pathetic. My 8 year old lenovo, as does my 5 year old S8 get 35mbs connected to the same router when both devices are placed next to each other.
I have updated all the drivers, done a bios update but still no better. Sometimes it works fine, but most of the time it is so poor that you cant even load a basic webpage, let alone stream videos etc.
Why is the performance of one of Dells top laptops (i9, 32gb ram etc etc) behind an 8 year old lenovo.....
Also the speakers rattle, just like everyone else reports - yet there is no known 'manufacture issue' in the words of a Dell technician...... hmm.....
If you're receiving the message the "Service not running" message, it means just that. Go to Services and look for the services beginning with "Killer". There should be four of them. The "Killer Network Service" is more than likely not running. Start it, then try running the Killer application.
I had the same issue. My XPS15 9510 was only getting approx 50Mbps over 5GHz, while my android phone right next to it was getting 600Mbps from the same Netgear satellite.
What mostly solved this for me was disabling Auto Bandwidth in the Killer suite and setting a custom value to a large number.
Now, I'm getting approx 500Mbps - still less than my phone, but enough.
It's pretty poor by the Killer suite to set such an unambitious throttling, and bury it in the settings
(edited)
EmanuelCanHelp
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Posted October 13th, 2025 19:09
I fix computers for a living and after hours of trying pretty much every different fix available here and online including eight different drivers as well as REG edit and GP edit settings, nothing was working. Internet was still unstable and wonky at best. Unfortunately on the XPS 15 9500 that passed through my workshop, the WiFi card is soldered so swapping it out with a different and possibly stronger card wasn't an option.
This ended up being my work around so I made a quick video. Hopefully this helps someone who has tried all the other fixes available with no luck. 🤞 I disabled the internal WiFi card. Internet is stable and working well now with no further issues.
https://youtube.com/shorts/xSCYRRkacMw?feature=share
The TP-Link low profile USB WiFi adapter I used was a 300Mbps version but they do make stronger ones that are 600Mbps and up if desired. I tried to see if any company makes a USB Type-C WiFi adapter but unfortunately they don't. It's not often I hit a brick wall like this where every attempted fix just doesn't pan out, but hopefully this helps someone get their WiFi up and running again. 🙏
tlatch52
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16 Posts
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Posted July 5th, 2021 11:00
In the Killer Wifi application check to make sure you aren't being throttled there.
Usually, on first setup it will have you run an internet speed test, then it will cap your download/upload speeds to a much smaller number for whatever reason.
Killer Control Center > Settings > Network Settings > Set bandwidth limits
Set the limits to a super high number. If that's not it, then I'm not sure, someone else can probably chime in.