Solved Windows vs. Dell Drivers?

The-Hive said:

I am never in any great rush to update, I wait for them except for Chipset and Bios, always Alienware/Dell Nvidia etc. I agree with Barman in posts #13 and #17

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There's always an exception to good advice. Even Dell BIOS can have bugs. (Everything can have bugs.)

My wife's Dell Inspiron 3793 worked fine out of the box, but after a driver and BIOS upgrade a Macrium Reflect image backup across WiFi would disable the WiFi adapter. (Reflect File & Folder backups worked fine.) Replacing drivers with old back-level versions did no good. Even though I'm allergic to changing BIOS, I bit the bullet and downgraded to the level that came with the laptop - version 1.13.0 from Sept. 2019, I think. That fixed the problem. I then tried more current versions but all I tried - up to 1.19.0 - failed.

The problem has something to do with sending a large stream of large blocks. A Robocopy to a VeraCrypt container eventually kills the WiFi card (although it took sending 15GB of data once). Dell agrees there's a problem and it will eventually be fixed. In the mean time the laptop stays on a very old BIOS.

Glad it was sorted, on the Alienware you cannot downgrade Bios

In some LAN adapters you can adjust the size of the large packet data, I am not sure if this applies to wireless adapters. I had a similar problem with a rather cheap USB card reader. Every time I copied large video files to my computer it would not keep up, slowed down too often and eventually lost contact. I had to remove it and insert it again to resume copying. For large files this meant to start over. I downloaded a copy utility that could limit the transfer speed, so I minimized the risk of a disconnection. Probably there's a similar utility to control speed of network traffic so your wireless adapter can keep up and not fail.

I've had many Dell XPS high-end laptops over the past 20 years. My methodology has always been to do my Microsoft updates and then run my supplied Dell utilities right afterward. The Dell utilities apparently are designed to work on all supported Dell laptops. After I run my Microsoft Updates the Dell Utilities sometimes apply other updates.

My current Dell supplied utilities are "Dell Command Update" and "Support Assist". They can be downloaded from Dell Support.

Driver Talent and similar tools download the latest driver in their database. This is not guaranteed to be the official Dell driver, it might be the same from Windows Update (generic with only basic functionality, not full featured). That is why I use these tools as a last resort (or when lazy to search for proper drivers). Also my own experience since 1985 tells me a newer driver can some times be worse (incompatible, some old features removed), so I always keep a copy of an older working driver to reinstall if necessary.

Device name Paul
Processor 11th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-1165G7 @ 2.80GHz 2.80 GHz
Installed RAM 8.00 GB (7.64 GB usable)
Device ID 28D55C6E-0791-4710-B003-9B88AAB14657
Product ID 00325-82146-69346-AAOEM
System type 64-bit operating system, x64-based processor
Pen and touch No pen or touch input is available for this display

Edition Windows 11 Home
Version 21H2
Installed on ‎07/‎04/‎2022
OS build 22000.593
Experience Windows Feature Experience Pack 1000.22000.593.0


I have the above Dell and owing to my love of fiddling about and messing it all up as I go far beyond my level of stupidity and so I have reinstalled Windows 11 from scratch with RUFUS and the relevant ISO too many times for my own good and always let the Microsoft Update tool in Windows 11 update all my drivers on my DELL and currently in Devise Manager there are no yellow exclamation marks and all is running well and it boots from "cold" in under 10 seconds.

Generally you should have no issues, but you might boost performance by installing latest graphics drivers directly from Intel's site.

The-Hive said:

Glad it was sorted, on the Alienware you cannot downgrade Bios

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Yes you can. I've always done it especially when I had my Alienware Area-51m as newer BIOSes crippled performance. Just a copy/paste from an old guide to give you an idea of how it's done.

1. Enable file extensions in File Explorer Options on your Windows (Start -> File Explorer Options -> View -> Uncheck "Hide extensions for known file types" and hit OK.
2. Download your required Alienware BIOS version from Dell website and rename it to BIOS_IMG.EXE. Now the fun part:
3. Place the BIOS_IMG.EXE file that you just renamed into the root of a drive, say C:\ drive for example.
4. Start -> Run -> CMD (right click and select Run as administrator)
5. Type C:/ and hit Enter. It will take you right to your C drive root where the BIOS_IMG.EXE file is located.
6. Type the following command: BIOS_IMG.EXE /writehdrfile and hit Enter. It will create a file named BIOS_IMG.HDR on your C drive. Rename that to BIOS_IMG.RCV as we'll use this as a recovery image. Both images are essentially the same.
7. Now, you have to create Dell Diagnostic USB stick. For that, use this article and SKIP steps 7-10 in it.
8. Copy BIOS_IMG.RCV from your C:/ drive onto the USB root. Make sure that the following 3 files exist on USB root when you are done: BIOS_IMG.RCV, DELLBIO.BIN and DELLRMK.BIN. DO NOT DELETE THE REMAINING FILES!
9. Now turn off your computer and plug the USB stick into the left USB port beside the thunderbolt 3 port.
10. Press and hold CTRL + ESC and press the power button to boot into BIOS recovery mode. Keep holding the two keys after releasing the power button until you reach the recovery screen. Once there, use the recovery option to flash BIOS.
11. Download and store away the files that you think might be needed in the future into a local storage or your email account just in case Dell makes any changes to them in the future.
12. DONE!
13. Do at your own risk. If you screw something up, I will not take any responsibility! This procedure works right now but may or may not work in the future.

@Spartan I know about those methods you suggested, they are just workarounds I was talking about people who do not wish to go that way, as tinkering with the bios, people only want official ways and there aren't any