Excuse the title, but may as well make it easy to find.  I’d been exper­i­en­cing prob­lems with per­form­ance, whilst net­work­ing, with my Dell XPS M1330.

CPU Spikes

Basic­ally, the CPU usage was spik­ing on a reg­u­lar basis.  I could feel when play­ing games, and it was annoy­ing.  It had star­ted rel­at­ively recently, and the pre­cise cause was unknown.  How­ever, a bit of Googling and I found Mark Russinovich’s excel­lent over­view of using Sys­in­tern­als Pro­cess Explorer and Kernrate to track down the root of this kind of spiky CPU usage.

And my prob­lem was exactly the same.  Same driver, same ver­sion — the B57nd60x 10.10.0.0 driver was gob­bling up CPU at a fright­en­ing rate.  How­ever, although he’d repor­ted the prob­lem, at the time there was no solu­tion and a new driver wasn’t avail­able on the Dell web­site.  A year later, the driver still isn’t avail­able — the Dell driver is res­ol­utely stuck at v 10.10.0.0 — so, no fix.

Excess­ive CPU con­sump­tion = poor bat­tery life

But it’s annoy­ing see­ing your CPU run­ning con­stantly at 20%.  It also has an impact on bat­tery life.

So I looked around a little fur­ther and found an updated driver to down­load at the the broad­com site, for ver­sion 11.7.3.0 — surely this would have a fix, as Broad­com were aware of the prob­lem thanks to Mark’s excel­lent work.

And it worked — the screen­shot below shows the impact — the first third or so shows the CPU usage with the old driver, and then it drops dramatically:

That Dell haven’t updated their driver pack in over a year is some­thing of a sup­port fail — it makes the XPS M1330, at least in cer­tain cir­cum­stances, some­what less of a great PC than it could be.  And it’s also poor for the PC com­munity — a lot of cri­ti­cism is made of Win­dows being some­thing that slows down over time.  It’s rarely the fault of Microsoft — often it’s driver issues, but find­ing the latest drivers isn’t easy for every­one, and it’s quite tech­nical to solve.  MS could pos­sibly make driver man­age­ment a sim­pler sys­tem, but the PC makers could help by keep­ing up to date driver packs — espe­cially for laptops which are rarely modified.

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