XPS 8950, extremely slow

Have you uninstalled all the bloatware that comes preinstalled on the machine? A "nuke and pave" clean install of Windows might fix the issue. If you do a search of the Dell Community, you can find the instructions for the clean install.

@RichSpring - Would help if you post your XPS 8950 specs:

• CPU
• GPU
• SSD and/or HDD
• Version of BIOS
• Etc

Yes this the first thing I did. Uninstalled all the bloatware, antivirus and disabled Cortana.

File operation feels very slow compared to 3-year XPS 8930.

Please see system setup below. Everything is supposed to be faster on paper. GPU is AMD RX6400. The GPU is not great still faster than the 3-yr old XPS 8930's GPU based on internet benchmark score. But this XPS 8950 is 50% to 80% slower than 3-yr old XPS 8930. A supposed upgrade became a downgrade.

Well, it would help if you provided the requested info (and worked the issue) instead of repeating yourself. Yeah, we get it and we are trying to help.  

Is your C-Drive a NVMe-SSD? What does Crystal Disk-Mark say it's r/w speed is?

What does CPU-ID's HW-Monitor say? Is something over-heating?

Do you have Virtualization-Based-Security (VBS) Enabled (Core-Isolation/Memory-Integrity = ON) ?

Speed of what programs exactly?

Open Command Prompt (type cmd into search box) and select "Run as Administrator". Type in (or copy/paste) CHKDSK and hit enter. Let it run. When that is done type in DISM /online /cleanup-image /restorehealth and hit enter. Take note of the scan results. Next type in SFC /SCANNOW and hit enter. No guarantee that this will help but it is easy and worth a try. And if you haven't already, uninstall SUPPORT ASSIST.

I did provide answers to the asked information. Back to your questions:

Yes C drive is official NVme-SSD coming with the XPS 8950. Crystal Report result is OK. See picture below:

HW monitor result looks normal.

Yes VBS is running. Will this make the computer slow?

VBS can make a PC slow, reports seem to vary between different people/PC, try shutting it off and see if it helps. Also how new is this PC? Could it be indexing a lot of files still? Can you run a stress test (CPU-Z or if HWMonitor has one is fine) and post another screen shot of the HW Monitor. I am looking for the P-core speed and the temp under load. You don't have to run it for a long period. Also a bench test in CPU-Z will let you compare your results to others with that CPU. 

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@RichSpring wrote:

1. I did provide answers to the asked information. :

2. Yes C drive is official NVme-SSD coming with the XPS 8950. Crystal Report result is OK. See picture below:

3. HW monitor result looks normal.

4. Yes VBS is running. Will this make the computer slow?

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1. Mostly. I said that because at that point we still didn't know if you got it with a spinning-platter HDD C-Drive. 

You STILL haven't mentioned what programs are "slow" .

2. Yes, now we finally know ... it's a nice fast NVMe-SSD ... Looks fine to me, so that's probably not it.

3. Mostly they do.
- Should Dell XPS-8950 System Memory Utilization be at 60% ?
- Why is the AMD RX-6400 video-card missing?

4. Yeah, I thought so. It can depending on what you are doing... you never said.

I don't see any mention of GPU model (eg, add-in NVidia or AMD card) or if this PC only has onboard Intel Graphics.

If it has an add-in video card, is the monitor connected to the card or to the onboard Intel Graphics DP?  If you have more than one monitor, where is each one connected, GPU or onboard DP, and what port types are used?

Exactly which NVME SSD do you have? There are firmware updates for a bunch of different brand SSDs Dell installs in XPS 8950 PCs.

Are you sure the OS is on the NVME SSD and not on the WDC HDD? There have been occasions when the OS got installed on the HDD instead of on the SSD.

Have you opened Task Manager and looked on its Performance tab to see where the bottleneck may be, eg, what hardware component is being used at a high % of its available capacity.

Are all 16 GB of RAM available in Win 11? Find out by scrolling farther down the msinfo32.exe screen you posted above...

Thank you very much.

This XPS 8950 is brand new, with bloatware uninstalled the first day. It has little new files. A Western Digital RED 2TB SATA drive was installed to provide extra storage. 

I disabled VBS and see a significant performance boost. VBS is enabled in default from new Dell XPS. 

Now the new XPS 8950 is about 20%-30% slower than 3-yr old XPS 8930. It is acceptable to use now, but still very unhappy about its performance. 

Please see HWMonitor result below:

Yes 100% sure that the OS is installed on fast C drive (NVMe). Slow D drive is only for storage. 

Both XPS 8950 and XPS 8930 have the same one drive setting (sync enabled). 

XPS 8930 even has icloud drive enabled and synched. XPS 8950 does not have icloud drive installed. 

XPS 8930 does have i7-8700 CPU at 3.2GHz. 3-yr old XPS 8930 runs significantly faster than this XPS 8950 with i7-12700 at 2.1GHz. 

Brand new Dell XPS 8950 all use NVMe as C drive, right? Both old XPS 8930 and this new XPS 8950 have the same amount 16GB memory. So it should be fair to compare their performance. The old XPS 8930 has a weaker GPU than this new XPS 8950 too. 

I mentioned that everything is slower in the new XPS 8950, file I/O, any applications form Notepad, Wordpad, Office, Photoshop, 50%-80% slower than 3-yr old XPS 8930 before I disabled the VBS.

After disabling VBS, I saw a significant boost of speed on this XPS 8950.

But this brand new XPS 8950 is still 20%-30% slower than 3-yr old XPS 8930 in almost every programs. 

It shouldn't be slower. Do you have any of your programs or onedrive set to sync? Yes, the NVMe drive should be the C drive and contain the OS, but as @RoHe pointed out, on rare occasions, sometimes mistakes are made. If you go to setting > system > storage > advanced storage settings > disks and volumes, you should be able to see which drive Windows is installed on. And again, running a bench mark will allow you to see if your CPU is performing like it should. Under the "CLOCKS section on HWMonitor, I can see in the 3rd column that the E-Cores are capable of running at the speed they are supposed to but I am not sure about the P-Cores. The first column and the third column should be pretty close to the same and up into the mid 3000MHz range if you check it while running a stress test or a benchmark test.