Dell XPS 13 2015 Broadwell Infinity Display Owners Thread

Thank you for the reply. I was originally going for the exact same setup (XPS 13 and P2715Q) but after reading few complaints about the fan noise, touchpad and adaptive brightness issues I went ahead with Lenovo X1 Carbon. But I guess it all works for you well enough. At least now I can get Dell's 4k monitor with confidence.

 

What model do you have?

 

Is it possible to charge the battery any faster with a bigger Dell power brick? It only comes with a 45W

 

New BIOS firmware available as of today: http://www.dell.com/support/home/us/en/04/Drivers/DriversDetails?driverId=RHPC0

 

i7-5500U, 8Gb ram, 256Gb (Samsung SM951), 14.0" QHD (2560x1440) non-touch. I've yet to receive it after a two-week wait. They're blaming it on Chinese New Year..

Ars Technica has got a review on X1 and AnandTech did one on Samsung SSD. Funnily enough, both mention throttling issues when running tests (GPU throttling in case of X1). But anyways, this is about XPS 13..

 

Hey, I have a 9343 i7-5500 8gb 256gb 3200touch. The fan is a little bit noisy. My lenovo is quiet but this new dell is annoying sometimes. And my excel of office 365 doesn't work well don't know why. Sometimes the temperature of the machine rises so fast. I just use it to surf internet, watch online video and excel.

 

Which of the dell drivers did you all download from their website?

 

I have the same thing with my screen and noticed it on another display model and also had it on my first one which I replaced due to a different reason. This 'texture' for me seemed like a thin layer of grease giving it a slight dot-like effect with dots even distributed over the screen coating. I decided it's 'normal' but might vary on different screens due to manufacturing process so most don't notice it.
Did you get it replaced for this BTW?

 

Received my XPS 13 (QHD, i5, 256) a few days ago shipped direct from the Microsoft store. Have had a few long evenings playing with it and have to say I am extremely impressed with the hardware. I have spent a lot of time on my partners MacBook Air and overall I am very happy with the build quality of the XPS 13. The QHD screen is outstanding, the keyboard a delight and the fan I very rarely hear. It runs cooler and quieter than the Air though to be fair that machine (which I love) is over 2 years old now.

Of course, no machine is perfect. As others have noted, trackpad scrolling initiation has some lag, and enough so to be irritating. The fact that once it is responding it is accurate leads me to think this is a software issue (touch wood!) and I am hoping to see a firmware update soon(ish!).

To be honest, the only thing I am not thrilled with is the software. Specifically the confused 8.1 GUIs (I use Windows 7 for work and much prefer it) and the fact that scaling support to suit high resolution displays like the QHD is just not there in most Windows 3rd party apps. This somewhat defeats the purpose of a beautiful screen but I guess it is the price you pay for being an early adopter. I should also say that on the software front I also had some issues with getting BlackBerry Link up and running, no doubt driver issues. But it seems to connect most of the time now, at least on one port! One oddity is that although I can get the safely eject option for my USB thumb drive, I have to dig around and manually disconnect the BlackBerry device (yes, I am concerned that I will wipe some data from the very device I am trying to backup!). I just hope this works if and when I really need it!

Last thing, which should probably be the subject of another thread, has anyone updated to the recommended drivers as yet? When I entered my service tag into the Dell Support tool it listed 6 driver updates as "recommended". I checked a couple of the drivers (e.g. HD Graphics) and the ones currently installed on the machine were 6 months older than the new recommended drivers. I updated the Realtek audio driver but stopped there thinking of the old "if it ain't broke.." adage.

So, how many of you guys are updating to the Dell recommended drivers?

 

btw what does that dell update app do? it never showed me any even though there were some updates available at the online support page.

 

To get to the list of updates I went to the Dell Support Assist app on the Windows home screen. Clicking that took me to a "Support" window. From there I clicked on "Tools and Info". That took me to the Dell Product Support webpage which was prepopulated with my Service Tag. From that page I selected "Drivers and downloads". On that page there was a button "Get updates for your specific system". Clicking that seemed to give me a list of recommended updates (6 drivers and a BIOS update as I recall) based on my service tag. From there I could select and download updates.

 

I suppose the Dell BIOS update doesn't fix the auto-brightness issue?

http://www.dell.com/support/home/us/en/04/Drivers/DriversDetails?driverId=RHPC0

my Dell arrives today somewhere; pretty fast shipping China->My door = 2 days; total production+shipping= 8 days

 

I live in Norway and ordered a i7, 560oU version from Dell the 29th of January. This suddenly got cancelled and after contacting Dell a new order was placed so that the ETA was delayed for a week or so to the 26th of February. Now, after the latest shipping update the ETA is March the 3rd.

 

I downloaded big bunny buck in 4k, but it stutters when playing that. Playback was in mpc and also there wasn't any sound later in the video but was still stuttering. The fan went up pretty hard.
I was hoping this machine could play this without any problems. I tried the 4k youtube video in IE and like you said it's working perfectly

 

A few remarks as I am considering buying this computer.

a) is there a online plan to buy the laptop? Like pay it in 3 months or something similar? It's a lot of money and I would prefer to pay it in a few stages if some emergency appeared

b) should i talk with some rep in order to get some kind of discount? And has someone from the uk use some vouchers without problems?

c) I see people recommending the Lenovo carbon x1 and I went to check it, but its more expensive and when I went to the forum people were also complaining about the screen and touchpad...

d) I actually saw people saying 8gb is not future proof and such, but as I recall, RAM is filled by the amount you have available, some programs, like chrome will try to allocate a lot to be fast, but again having 8gb should be enough for most people. And I am not saying that some programs will not need RAM, I am just stating from a normal user point of view, if you have 16gb, windows and programs will try to fill the whole 16gb without you really know it or need it. (or am I saying some really stupid?)

e) Have anyone tried just using IE and uninstalling chrome and checking the battery?

And that's about it, thank you.

 

I can only see 87% battery life remaining, but not e.g. 8.5 hours remaining? is this setting normal for this laptop?

 

I am running Windows 10 build 9926 on my XPS and, while I am delighted with overall performance, build etc., I have two issues:
1. Microsoft Lync won't run. Neither the Modern app, Lync Basic or the Office 2013 version will start - they all just hang on the launch splash screen. I have read about Lync issues with Bluetooth but completely BIOS disabling and uninstalling drivers for this didn't fix the issue.
2. IE crashes very frequently, whereas Chrome is fine.

Is anyone else running Win 10 on their XPS 13 2015 and are Lync and/or IE working for you?

 

I didn't try Lync, but IE (with new rendering engine) also crashes on my desktop ruining win10. New ie runs really fast and efficient, but is unstable. On the other hand, chrome had more functions and is more stable, but not efficient (can't run 4k smoothly and much higher CPU usage). At this moment, I have to use both for different tasks.

 

So yesterday I went ahead and installed Starcraft 2 since I remembered you mentioning the game. The game itself was running fine in 1600x900 - no blur at all. There is a bug plaguing Blizzard games - if you have DPI scaling higher than 149% the mouse pointer gets stuck (check here: http://us.battle.net/sc2/en/forum/topic/147174824). The solution is to either set the scaling to 149% or run the game in firescreen windowed mode (but I thought the performance got hit a bit in this mode). I did not change the game settings but the graphics seemed nice and the gameplay was smooth.

I can check other games for you if you want to. I am more of a strategy player (Crusader Kings 2, Europa Universalis IV, Civilization, Colonization etc.) These run great but I guess they are not very demanding.

Cheers

 

fan is spinning as crazy:

open IE => 5 sec fan
open acrobat reader => 5-110 sec fan

I did the following
- disabled speedstep
- went to dell command power manager & put profile on "quiet"
- went to power plan & changed TDP to 2.6ghz and 0.6ghz

this didn't work...

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windows update are installed. Maybe they will still be installing further for a few days in the background? Not sure...

 

Same here, how to fix?

Also why does the touchpad light and the power button light turn on sometimes, and how to turn them off?

I've had no issues with the fan or the display.

 

Hi all,

although I do not yet have the XPS13, I am checking the thread from time to time to see if there are any major complains, but to those who have some fan issues, you could try the following, at least to determine what is causing it:
-download process explorer ( https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896653.aspx )
-run it as administrator ( its MS tool, so no worries for anything suspicious )
-try to identify the most CPU stressing process.

I am saying that, since on my Dell ( different model) laptop, a WiFi card update caused one of the CPU's thread to be almost always at 20%. That causes the fan to always spin ( even at the lowest settings ) since the CPU is not idle. One might think a driver update should be fine, but in my case it wasn't.

That could at least help identify is there a software problem, causing the CPU to be used all the time or it is a firmware related problem at your particular laptop.

 

thanks. I checked the program

firefox starting = 94.7% [fan]
after starting firefox = 1% [no fan]
play 10 youtube videos at same time in firefox = 30-40% [no fan]

it seems a problem with launching programs (other programs have similar issue); not sure what could be reason

 

yes but that site lists some updates that are already installed. also what is the "automatically check for updates" supposed to do then?
well maybe that Service isnt completely rolled out yet

 

if I remember correctly, anandtech said that the dell Display Driver isnt the newest. in their case some Kind of hd vidoes showed bad Performance. they uninstalled the preloaded Driver and installed the newest original Intel one

 

I am actually not sure what the "Get updates for your specific system" is checking against. Perhaps it compares against a static database of what configuration your laptop was built with? I say that because for the few drivers that it recommended I update, when I checked on my machine comparing the version/date of the recommended driver against that which came pre-installed, the recommended drivers were indeed 6 months newer (I should say this was a spot check of 3 or so, I didn't check all 6 it recommended). Yet when I decided to upgrade the Realtek audio driver (worked fine) when after the upgrade was completed I requested a new list of driver updates it provided the same list despite the fact that when I check the Realtek driver it does appear to have been successfully updated. Perhaps it is because I didn't sign in with a Dell account? I.e. it successfully identified what needed changing from the factory build but then ignored the update I did apply.

I have no idea but what I think what the Dell utility should do is scan my installed drivers and then tell me which ones should be updated. This is one reason why I stopped doing the driver upgrades as I realised as a workaround I should start to manually record what I updated (from, to etc.) so that I don't need to keep reinspecting the actual installed drivers against Dell's recommended updates list (assuming the latter changes!). I will also likely start creating some descriptive restore points as I go. Which all seemed like a lot of work when nothing was obviously broken, or I should say when none of the recommended driver upgrades would address the only problem I had (trackpad)! However, I will likely update the graphics driver tonight as I recall that was also quite dated (which took me by surprise so I will double check that).

 

Do you mean this

Isn't this just for video conversion? Or is it the same thing?

 

Any way to stop battery charging at 80%. My previous laptop had this to save battery life. Any way to do this here?

 

blue13x:
check this one :
http://forum.notebookreview.com/thr...ble-battery-charging-while-plugged-in.771523/

 

So your battery never reaches 100%?

 

Perfect. This should help with battery life.

 

Why don't you use the dual monitor setup when presenting? Have your speaker notes or whatever on the laptop and the presentation at the NATIVE display setting for the external device. Don't use mirror, use extend instead. Problem solved.

Just hit the Win Key + P and you should be good to go.

 

It has to do with the fact that Chrome renders everything in software instead of using the hardware as IE does.

 

I am also running W10 9926 and IE cashed on me routinely as well. For me, when I disabled the Google toolbar and Google search engine, I have not experience any IE crashes for the last 5-6 days. FYI, I own the QHD+ i7 8G/256G

 

How is the battery for you guys? Can anybody confirm this, I am experience some battery degradation every time I charge the battery up, the battery would lose about 30-50 mWh for every charge cycle. Its been almost 2 weeks and my battery went from 52,300 down to 51,615 mWh and counting... Can anybody verify this for me?

 

I have FHD screen,

don't think the brightness is so extreme as the reviews said? Which brightness level do you guys put your screen, for ordinary use?

Is it possible some screens have different brightness, does my seem to have some production error? (p.s. i unchecked adaptive brightness etc.)

===

also when I go to Power Plan, and put "adaptive brightness" ON or OFF, this makes no difference... this makes me suspect that the screen is stuck by default in "adaptive brightness" mode; does that setting make any difference on your laptops?

 

Do you have an iPhone or iPad? If so you can download LuxMeter from the Appstore, it uses iPhone camera to measure the brightness in lux. Everybody who has iPhone pls have a test pls. Mine at maximum brightness on white background got 1820 lux at the maximum. Thank you

 

it got 300Lx max (measured on Android/Samsung S5)


My other 4 year old inspiron 17" has 350Lx

 

lol is it on white or black? It cant be that low=.=

 

I'm at 50.2 Wh. I've seen 3 distinct wears during the first two weeks (two on the first 5 or so charges...) which dropped capacity to this level. I've then set the battery to only charge to 95% using Dell's Power Manager App and haven't seen any wear since. Still, I find that extremely annoying.

 

Anybody experience computer lag when using IE with about 15+ tabs open or when opening task manager? Can u check when you open task manager, the CPU usage when up almost 100% and down right away?

 

Hi there, where can I download this Dell's Power Manager App? Cant seem to find it anywhere. Thank you

 

I tried that, but my battery is still 100%...

 

+

I would not trust any phone reading, as they are prone to many mistakes and highly depends on the method you "test" the screen ( regardless is it iphone or android ).
Source: I have S4 and depending on the app, the sensor reads different data randomly, without changing anything when laying down.

I doubt the big tech reviewers ( like Anandtech, Ars, etc ) are using phones when measuring the brightness.

The phone's sensor is just for fun to indicate when the phone is "covered" during call or there is major change in light.
Again, I would not trust any of those reading as serious. There are several requirements when measuring the light the last time I checked in the uni, and using just the phone just like that is not one of them.

 

I guess you are right, that's why I asked somebody hav an iPhone and use the same app as mine so we can have the reading in the same condition. Anyway it wouldn't work though, I just use it to compare the brightness of the XPS and my iPhone 6 screen, its only about 65% of the iPhone 6 screen

 

I guess you mean this: http://en.community.dell.com/techcenter/enterprise-client/w/wiki/7535.dell-command-power-manager

 

Seems like the desktop replacement hasn't arrived yet for me, probably not for the price I paid for the XPS.

I am getting a ridiculous Chrome lag as type. I didn't expect this from the last gen ultrabook. My seven years old Lenovo R61 Penryn is smoother than this. So what the hell Dell? Also the text seems a bit blurry on the FHD, maybe I am not used to it. What the hell was Dell thinking preloading the McAfee? That crap ate almost all available RAM for breakfast. The dropbox offered the 20GB, signed up and boom, no any credit. Any ideas how to receive it?

I love the form factor, love the design and it is also very quiet. The fan comes on very rarely. I got the i3, btw.

 

Let's be fair here, OK?

1. You got i3 (probably 4GB of RAM as well, no?), so I'm not sure what "desktop replacement" you were expecting. That said, your system should be fast enough.
2. Chrome lag, McAffee/etc. are all software issues that have NOTHING to do with Dell. Don't want bloatware? Install a clean copy of Windows and don't use any of Dell's drivers/software. Chrome should not and does not lag at all. I have 10+ tabs open at any given time, 1 tab always streams music and I do web debugging and other memory/CPU-intensive work in other tabs. 0 lag.
3. Are you running FHD @ 100% scaling? If yes, the screen should be razor-sharp.

 

FYI - I finally installed all the Dell recommended driver updates (I didn't update the BIOS, don't believe in applying BIOS updates without me knowing it to fix a problem I am having).

No obvious functional differences (which is a not a bad thing) though I should say I haven't connected any external drives or otherwise stressed the machine. It would be nice to see an update to address the two finger scrolling lag.

Only change I experienced after the updates was after updating to the Dell recommended graphics driver (the factory installed one was dated Sept. 2014), and that was that the update added an "Intel HD Graphics Control Panel" shortcut to my desktop. I'm not sure if the application was already installed, possibly it was.

 

Can you with the new intel drivers try to play a 4k video on your pc. Not streaming it from the internet but really only the pc. Can you then let us know how the playback is please?