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Quote: So, you've paid for the licensed version of Windows 10 that you're blowing away
You have never done this - have you?  No. You do not blow away the license you paid for. My precise procedure for a new machine is:
1. Unpack the machine and hook up monitors, keyboards, etc.
2. Connect network cable so the OEM Windows 10 gets registered with Microsoft as soon as I turn on power and register with Microsoft using my MS account. (A MS account is nice but NOT essential.)
3. Turn machine off. That's it. Windows 10 is now registered for that machine with MS for ever.
4. Replace the system drive (if you wish). It has no effect on the machine's MS license.
5. Using Diskpart clean and repartition the system drive.
6. Using a Windows 10 installation tool that is a free download from MS, do a clean install on the newly partitioned system drive. This step takes 15 or so minutes if your system drive is a good NVMe SSD. Once again you may or may not opt to use your MS account and password.
7. When the first clean version of Windows is up and running, check Windows activation in Control Panel >> System. You will see that Windows 10 is activated!
8. Then I usually do the Windows updates that can take a while.
Try it if you ever buy an OEM in the future. It works!
Yes, you need to be computer savvy to mess with disk partitions, etc. For this reason I get called in whenever a family member scores a new machine. I enjoy helping.
By the way: Diskpart is a dangerous tool in the hands of the inexperienced. Research it well before using it, to avoid disasters!
modified 8-Jan-20 10:34am.
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Right. I wasn't sure if you were completing the process of getting the system activated first with the OEM version, and then blowing it away. You're right, if you let it go through that process first, then yeah, the "free" installer from the MS site will recognize the system as already activated with that license.
It does means however it's lot more time-consuming than it needs to be - by the time everything is said and done, Windows has been set up twice. Plus the download time (a 4GB+ download in my case is a roughly 2-hour endeavor). At least you can hang on to the ISO...
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Quote: a 4GB+ download in my case is a roughly 2-hour endeavor
Ouch! But if you create the install tool you only need to do the download once- right?
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Correct - that's what I meant by "...at least you can hang on to the ISO".
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PIEBALDconsult wrote: I don't buy off-the-shelf PCs
I guess you don't build laptops eh?
"Go forth into the source" - Neal Morse
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I once had to replace the disk drive in a laptop that was designed in such a way that you had the take the entire system apart to get to the drive, including removing the main board. What a nightmare! Took me many hours and afterwards the WiFi never worked again. 
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Just like whne you try to replace the LCD on a smartphone 
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Dell used to use quality components but like every other manufacturer has gone to saving every cent possible on all but their high highest-end models - all products.
In fact just last week I was looking at laptops, (not just Dell). It's sad the mid-range models I was looking at from every manufacturer all have at least one, usually more, compromises in quality/performance. To get a truly uncompromised laptop really meant buying high to highest end.
In the end I bought: dinner - after wasting a whole day on research decided to give up on buying a crap-top.
Until recently I had an old i3 Dell, (gen 3 or 4 - "M," 2 cores without hyperthreading), that noticeably outperformed [a batch of] 8th gen i5 Dell Desktops one of my clients purchased year before last. CPU benchmarks were lower on the i3 but just running win 7 or 10 the laptop ran noticeably MUCH faster. desktop hard disks were supposedly faster but real life came out measurably slower (even without a stopwatch), boot/shutdown time: i3 by a lot, program startup: i3 ... I ran visual studio on the i3 laptop: always instant responsive (couple of seconds to start), very very useable. Tried vs on one of the i5 desktops - almost threw up (both me and seemed the desktop too).
I have no idea why (yes: all 'tuned' the same etc). On paper that i3 was a dinosaur, the i5's "modern."
Laptops really seem suck more and more every year.
after many otherwise intelligent sounding suggestions that achieved nothing the nice folks at Technet said the only solution was to low level format my hard disk then reinstall my signature. Sadly, this still didn't fix the issue!
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This (and the original slow SSD) takes me back to when I was managing a small group of 50 computers. We were obliged by Corporate to switch to Dell and I started to see really weird performance differences between different, but similar, models - some being slower than the old PCs they had replaced.
I called in Dell and the technician who came swapped out the motherboards in the 'slow' units - suddenly they ran normally. When I asked what the problem was the answer was rather shocking... "Often they discover that there is instability or lockups due to errors in m/b design and chipset implementation. To remedy this they often insert enforced wait cycles in the CPU or slow it (or the bus) down and fudge the bios to falsely report correct speeds. If the client doesn't complain they leave it be and if they do they get a corrected m/b"
This smells as bad as the VW emissions scandal, but it was more than 10 years ago so I'm not in any way suggesting that things like this are still happening today.
Incidentally we never saw that particular technician again.
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Wow! I find it hard to believe that Dell would do that. But who knows?
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Was his name Tuttle, and did he look like Robert DeNiro?
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Cp-Coder wrote: One of the first items I checked was the speed of the M.2 SSD. I was very disappointed. Dell had supplied the machine with a SSD that ran barely faster than clunky old SATA SSDs. In fact the sequential read speed was slightly slower than her old SATA SSD.
Somebody's spoiled. I'm happy with any SSD. I still have machines that boot off of spinning drives.
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Quote: Somebody's spoiled
True, I blush to disclose. But the first time you work with a quality NVMe SSD, you may quickly join the folds of us "spoilt" folks!
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When a system already takes more time performing its POST routine from a cold boot (with no way around it) than getting to the login screen, I've already stopped caring.
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OK, but drive speed is not just about boot time. It matters whenever you are dealing with reading / writing large files.
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Purely for argument's sake (because I know exactly what you're saying and I'm in your camp already):
I read large files all the time: My largest files are typically movies, and even my oldest spinner is complete overkill and has no problem keeping up with playback.
OTOH: If you need to move terabytes around (which I've done), then we're talking minutes rather than hours, so yeah - great. But how often do you do that?
The greatest argument in favor of SSDs (and faster), IMO, is in bootup time, and application startup time. Typical users otherwise don't shuffle huge files around so frequently it matters much to them. If SSDs matched the price/capacity of spinners, that's all I'd be running (on the last Black Friday, I bought 10TB spinners for CAD$225 each). Awesome for my NAS and its offline/offsite backups. When are we going to see comparable SSDs in that price range/capacity? I'm patiently waiting.
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You can USB 3.0-to-NVMe boxes, and turn the M.2 drive into an external drive.
I've seen them advertised for ~USD 20 on Amazon; no idea about the quality.
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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When I set up a home-built machine 2 years ago, it took me quite some time to get the Samsung (IIRC it was a 950 Pro) working correctly. The culprit was Windows which didn't have an appropriate driver, and therefore didn't set up it's modes correctly. Maybe your original Dell machine wasn't set up correctly either?
Not sure about Dell, but here at the office we've spent a lot of time to get our HP machines working properly, because HP failed to set up the machines (with NVME drives) correctly, and our IT failed to fix it because they relied on (incorrect) info from HP.
GOTOs are a bit like wire coat hangers: they tend to breed in the darkness, such that where there once were few, eventually there are many, and the program's architecture collapses beneath them. (Fran Poretto)
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Quote: Maybe your original Dell machine wasn't set up correctly either?
That is entirely possible! But I tried to update the driver on the SSD and was told the driver is up to date. When I replaced the SSD with a Samsung 970 PRO, the problem was resolved immediately.
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I recently bought an HP. Very well constructed. Same unit at dell would've been $400 more at least.
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Sounds like an entry level DRAMless model (some of these use system ram as a cache, which helps a little but is nowhere close to onboard ram). The good news is that they're the first m.2 drives to be as cheap as SATA ones; the bad as you've seen is that they perform at best marginally faster than sata models.
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, weighing all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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Very interesting! Thanks for posting this. 
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Did you try just reseating the Dell M.2? If it worked, fine, if not, it would only take 5 min. In the past, I would have wiped the disk and reloaded Win10 from scratch. Did you do that when you installed the new SSD or did you clone? Lots of variables there.
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Quote: Did you try just reseating the Dell M.2?
Yes. I even used an adapter to plug it into X4 connector of the PCIexpress bus. That killed the BIOS! The BIOS wouldn't start. This same adapter works just fine today in the same X4 slot, with a Samsung M.2 item mounted. There is definitely something very screwy with the M.2 unit supplied by Dell. (This second unit in the X4 slot is her data drive.)
I never clone drives. I always install a new, clean instance of Windows. Just between you and me: I rather enjoy doing a fresh Windows install. Yeah. Some people call me weird! 
modified 8-Jan-20 11:49am.
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