CRITICAL_PROCESS_DIED BSOD on Dell XPS 15 9550

Earlier this week, a student walked into my office with his Dell XPS 15 9550 in hand. Sometimes his computer would behave, and sometimes, during heavy load, it would die with a CRITICAL_PROCESS_DIED BSOD. Dell’s own recovery DVD image was unable to restore the computer to a working order. The support personnel at Dell suggested using Microsoft’s Media Creation Tool to download a Windows 10 ISO image. Burning the ISO image to a DVD and reinstalling Windows made the computer runnable to some degree. As soon as we installed the WiFi driver, we got that dreaded CRITICAL_PROCESS_DIED BSOD again. Googling for “Dell XPS 15 9550 CRITICAL_PROCESS_DIED” gave results about the NVMe disk device driver being a possible culprit. This issue has existed for almost a year and are hardly isolated to a few instances. Maybe the XPS 15 9550 model suffers from poor choice of hardware components or bad hardware design.