XPS 12 9250 FINALLY A STABLE MACHINE!!!

Hi all, I am here to share my experience with the Dell XPS 12 9250. Hopefully this will help 9250 users on setting up their devices.

I recently purchased a Dell XPS 12 9250 with Intel m5-6y54, 128GB SSD and 256GB of RAM. Just to say for the first few days, the experience wasn't so great. I have had numerous issues with this machine and for a moment there, I think I almost slammed my hammer into it. Some of the troubles I experienced were: device can't go to sleep, device cannot resume from sleep/hibernation, device won't boot, blue screen of death (trouble with rtdvhd64.sys), to name a few....

Ever since I started using computer many many years ago, I have numerous experience in putting PCs together, and getting the OS and other applications up and running. I am the type that like to format my system every couple months to ensure I have the best performance out of my PC. From that, I know that many faults are simply due to the improper installation of drivers and applying the incorrect updates.

After three days of numerous restoring the XPS 9250, I feel that I have finally found an installation that I will be keeping and I have not experience any problems so far. Here is how I do it:

1. Restore your system back to the Dell factory image. This will wipe all data and restore the computer to as if it just left the factory.

2. Once the restore is completed, proceed to the Intel website and download their Intel Drive Update Utility. Run the software and it will scan your systems and apply the latest drivers for your devices. The Dell Support website is very slow to providing updates so there is a strong chance the Dell Support website ones are already outdated.

3. *VERY IMPORTANT* - I try to only install and update device drivers one at a time! So when selecting your items to update, select one item only and then once the download and install is done, restart your computer. Then repeat until all Intel drivers are updated.

4. Go to Dell Support website and go to Drivers & Download. Input your system service tag. Hit detect drivers and follow on screen prompt for Dell to detect devices on your system for updates. Again, make sure you apply updates one at a time. Remember to restart machine after. (if you have an outdated BIOS, this will also allow the BIOS to update.)

5. Now your system should have the most updated drivers for your devices. But we are not done. My XPS 9250 had regular blue screen of death saying there is something wrong with rtdvhd64.sys. After some Google search, this file relates to the audio driver and its software. For me, step #4 above did not ask me to update my audio card drivers as I already had the most updated drivers from the restore. But I went ahead and manually look for the audio driver on the Dell Support website and reinstall the drivers package again for my sound card. The package will uninstall existing drivers and reinstall. Although I am installing the same set of drivers as if the one that came with the factory image but somehow this stopped the rtdvhd64.sys errors.

6. Now apply windows update. Just let windows detect whatever updates is necessary and let it apply. Do not install any new software/applications until Windows update is completed.

7. Once done, I always like to restart windows again to ensure all the updates are applied.

8. The system should be very stable at this point. I like to enable system restore and create a system restore point. So that in event I screw something up down the road, I can always jump back to this stage.

9. I then proceed with installing Office 365, anti-virus, and other applications I need. But I always do it one-by-one, with a restart of the system in between. (If you want, you can create restore points in between as well so you don't have to reinstall all applications if you end up restoring your system to a previously saved point)

10. Once all applications are installed, I like to just try opening everything up, see if the machine crashes. Also, test putting the machine to sleep with applications opened in the background. And try to resume. If you encounter problems, restore to latest restore point and try again. But for me so far so good!

11. For those of you that like to manage your power scheme, my Dell XPS 9250 only shipped with one power scheme -- Balanced, also not all features are enabled within the scheme. If you Google, there is a way to enable all other power schemes by changing a registry item. While it certainly will be helpful and will work with other devices, I found that this will break the XPS 9250 and prevent it from sleeping. Every time I enabled other power schemes from the registry and reboot, the system will not be able to go to sleep anymore and ended up restoring to a last known good point. I know it's disappointing but for now, just use whatever Dell has supplied

That's it guys. This is how I arrived at a stable, fast XPS 12 9250. I am very happy with it so far.

All comments welcome.