Dell XPS 13 2015 Broadwell Infinity Display Owners Thread

@bamaster of course . Disabled it in Power Plans and I don't have an option for it under Display in Windows 8's settings.

 

So it's usable on 1080 as a daily driver resolution? Not too much blur?

 

I had 3200x1800 for my XPS 15. I had to resize eveyrthing to 150% via windows 8 to make it acceptable.

I assume that QHD (3200x1800) on the XPS 13 even "presses more pixels on a smaller space." Hence the 100% native resolution will make the pictograms even smaller. To correct this, one must use Windows 8.0 to compensate even more (do 200% adjustment?) to make it accesible? Is this train of though correct? This might be problematic for some applications/software which don't yet support HDPI.

Is it possible to get decent sized icons and text on the screen very easily?

 

There is a new quite positive review on Engadget here:

The author seems quite happy about the machine. His only gripes were with the touchpad and average battery life, but I guess we already knew that from the mini reviews of other users.

 

Just pretty generic. Nothing to bring home about. No change for good or worse compared to other premium laptops.

 

Def usable in 1080p!

 

I WANT TO MAKE DARN CLEAR:

1. Touchpad IS INDEED HORRENDOUS. PERIOD. You wanna argue with me? Bring it on. The reviews that claim it's the best touchpad are full out misleading and straight up wrong. END OF DISCUSSION. One thing that Dell DID solve was it no longer registers random click while you type, which was MAJOR issue in previous gen XPS machines.

2. Battery life is like 7 hrs for i5/QHD machines. You can try claiming otherwise, but when you use touchpad, Windows allocates stupid cpu time on the machine, spiking good 2whr. If you have some software that runs battery testing without touchpad used, it might get you 9 hrs, sure. But in reality, 6.5hrs-7hrs. Which isn't bad numbers. My Win 7 machine has fully optimized drivers and settings. Trust me. I know how to work with Windows and Dell machines more than anyone else on this board.

There are goods and bad. Goods are everything you can read on reviews.

Bad: Touchpad, shallower keyboard (but not that bad to type for light office work tbh).

Decent: Battery life (it is what it is)

Good: BUILD-OUT FXCKING STANDING-QUALITY. Absolutely no flex, including keyboard. Wow! Great speakers too actually with their own grills!

Ask me anything else. I tell the story as is. No sunk cost bias BS on my end. If I find something inadequate and shxtty, I share the story.

Oh and the price.. well is 100% reasonable. I had to get that out...

 

I have an i7/256gb version on the way and the feedback coming out on the touchpad is making me nervous. Does anyone know how difficult Dell is with returns? Is it hard to get out of the 15% restocking fee? Just trying to figure out if I'm gonna be stuck with this computer even if I can't stand the touchpad.

Also, does anyone know if you can run dual monitors using the display port and that dell adaptor accessory?

 

MIcrosoft and OEMs gave up figuring out the touchpad situation. That's why MS pushed for touchscreen integration.

Expect to use touchscreen all the time. Or else, not even worth unboxing for touchpad disappointment. When sealed, a lot easier for returns.

 

I am running 2 dell 2K monitors via dp and the monitors ate dp chained. No issues at all. The only thing is the scalling when plugged into dp vs when not plugged in. But that's not a dell issue, its a windows issue.

 

I skipped straight to the last page here. What aren't you happy with with the touchpad? This is definitely the most responsive touchpad I've ever used on a Windows laptop. Two finger scrolling and even zooming (which I never really use) work smoothly and 100% of the time. The worst I've ever used was the one on my Inspiron 11, doing simple scrolling required constant fiddling. This XPS13 touchpad is as close to a Mac touchpad as it gets, this is coming from a guy who's been using Macbooks for the past few years. My only complaint is the lack of back/forward support on the desktop.

 

Works fine on Win 8, I was referring to on Win 7 (my setup). Even on Win 8 my experience wasn't something that I could "compare" to Macbooks. But it was fine on Win 8.

But I do remember scrolling being a little awkward on Win 8. Tried to find settings to undo the reverse scroll, etc, but no settings I could find. Just kind of made me super pissed.

 

I don't understand exactly how this type of "precision touchpad" works now, since it doesn't rely on a driver in the device manager. I'm guessing this is why it sucks on Windows 7, the lack of driver.

Oh man that reverse scrolling "pioneered" by Apple not too long ago, drove me nuts for a little while. Always turned it off by unchecking "natural scrolling". And then I got used to it, which made going to a Windows touchpad incredibly and surprisingly confusing - do I scroll the scrollbar or do I scroll the screen lol. I'm used it it now and going back to the way it used to be (scrolling the scrollbar) is just so unnatural now.

The reverse scrolling is in the Win8 PC settings app under PC and devices/mouse and touchpad.

 

Dellienware I think you should make that clear in your post No. 257. The way you wrote it implies that the touchpad is bad regardless of the OS. If it only applies to Win7 you should add it to the post.

 

With all due respect, your opinion on the touchpad isn't worth much. You're using it on Windows 7, which isn't how you bought it or how it is intended to be used. Every review by tech bloggers really likes the touchpad. Calling it HORRENDOUS without explicitly saying that you wiped your machine and installed a 5 year old OS on it, frankly, is irresponsible.

I haven't received mine yet. So I'll be able to give a personal opinion soon. But let's be a little less misleading with our early reviews. Peace!

 

1) Can you give me some specific examples when things go wrong? (jumping, inaccurate selection, scrolling...)

2) Doesn't Dell have some application that can fine-tune the touchpad (like protection of jumping when typing on keyboard)

3) Do you think it's a driver issue? Or is it a build issue? Is it very likely dell releases some driver updates soon?

4) In my terminological book, I make a distinction between touchpad/trackpad.Trackpad = gestures from windows on touchpad. Touchpad is just the basics. Is only the trackpad bad, or the touchpad as a whole?

5) I have an XPS 15, whch for me has an "acceptable" touchpad. Do you suggest that the touchpad become worse vis-a-vis the previous generation of XPS?

6) I can imagine Macbook has a much excellent touchpad. Depends what you use as "standard" to compare. I hope the XPS 13 is somewhere in higher-half of the spectrum of all touchpads on 13" laptops.

Thank you very much for your kindness

 

Sorry, didn't read your post that you removed windows 8 and installed windows 7. Other experiences/replies to my above questions (original settings of laptop) are very welcome!

I just need to read all day pdfs [=SCROLL] and put things in color [=SELECTION]. I can hardly belief those basic features don't work properly on such an expensive laptop. A balanced/nuanced view of the touchpad is very welcome.

 

I wonder how much longer the battery will last for the 1080 screen. 8+ hours?

 

Touchpad on Win 8 works "fine" but I indicated that what these bloggers wrote was more of an exaggeration. Coming in with too high of an expectation? Maybe. Besides Dell fixing the random touch clicks while you type, there wasn't much "improvement" regarding navigation and scrolling.

Bamaster, I noted many times this is running on Win 7. But the way this thread runs (linearly), people aren't reading from pages back.

Here:

Win 7 Touchpad: Horrendous
Win 8 Touchpad: FIne, but nothing as bloggers call it - "best ever omg"

Like I said, maybe I had too high of an expectation going in. But it's also the overall smoothness that Windows lack.

Also the situation where you make physical clicks but apparently the click itself wasn't pressured enough so the actual click doesn't register is continued issue from previous gen.

When it physically clicks ultimately, I don't care how light it was, click should register. But often, I am left in a situation asking myself "Did they click go through? Oh I guess not let me click again more firmly" - All in split seconds. It gets super annoying and def was one of the things that made previous gen suck.

 

On my XPS 15 there is Dell touchpad software included. It allows you to configure the "pressure" of clicking. Maybe you can download it from Dell website and it solves your problem?

 

I concur on both points - best ever on a Windows laptop and the physical click requiring more force than necessary to register a click. I mostly used tap to click so it doesn't bother me as much as missing forward/backward gesture on the desktop.

No more Dell touchpad control utility. This type of precision touchpad is completely controlled by Windows - there isn't even a driver any more in device manager, it's just the generic mouse driver from 2006.

 

I could be wrong but i believe the Windows 8.1 touch pad driver is called Intel Serial IO. If your doing Windows 7 it has a synaptic driver on the dell support site, which btw inst well optimized.

 

Ow didn't know that. It seems awfful Dell didn't use their software for the touchpad. I do assume windows drivers support some basic features/configurations (like protection of touch when typing, speed of pointer, two-finger gestures,...)?

(edit post: for info... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0QOIWoTJYw )

 

This means that using the touchscreen and not the touchpad saves battery life?

 

No. I have no idea how much touchSCREEN uses. But reality is that mere using of touchpad ramps up battery usage. That's just not unoptimized the things are.

 

Got mine this afternoon. i5/256/QHD. So far, so good.

My screen brightness is a little uneven on white backgrounds. Slightly annoying. It will catch my eye and the more I stare at it, the more noticeable it is, but then I look away and I wonder if I'm just imagining things. One of the reviews I saw today said something about theirs having what looked like a mustache shape shadow or something and it sounds somewhat similar to what I'm seeing. There's also a darker column coming up from the bottom about 1/3 of the way up the screen that I notice sometimes too. There's some bleed too I think on the sides but that doesn't bother me like the uneven backlighting. Otherwise it looks good to me when the screen's not white (and it's not terrible when white).

The touchpad's not been a problem for me either. I've been two finger scrolling in Chrome and it's been fine for me.

Got the Samsung 256 drive.

The fan's only got what I'd call loud once when I installed Keepass and I think it did some sort of .net optimization at the end of the install. I hear it occasionally doing other things, but it's not annoying me either.

I have a bluetooth Microsoft mouse paired to it and it's working well with it too.

Mostly happy so far! A little disappointed in the display but otherwise I like it. The size and materials is flat out awesome as far as I'm concerned.

 

Has anyone found a fix for the adaptive brightness issue?

 

I figured out my Windows 7 touchpad issue.

Even after a few clean reinstallation of synaptics drivers (and rebooting of course), initially the touchpad can save and maintain settings. But couple mins later, while I am using the device! It reverts back to old weird settings. And there is nothing I can do to revert the settings back even if I save it.

This is screwing up everything and the only solution appears to be entire OS reinstallation...

Anyone know how setting changes on its own and won't save my settings?

 

Check here

Adaptive Brightness - Turn On or Off in Windows 8

I disabled all the settings in the power options, and disabled the service. Not sure if it really works though.

 

How about power consumption of 1) using a USB mouse vs 2) using the trackpad?

 

has anyone tried installing Windows 10 technical preview and getting the display drivers to recognize?

 

i will do another Win 7 fresh install tonight and get back to you guys.

Something just happens with touchpad that rolls back settings and makes it unusable. Want to give it the benefit of the doubt.
Win 8 still sucks in some functionality.

 

I remember similar things with the touchpad happening with the Haswell Zenbook UX32LA (Core i3-4010U) and Win 8. I have used it for a few days and was testing it out a bit. When you switch to Task manager and Performance tab (the graphs showing the CPU usage) you could see the CPU usage when idle (no programs running etc.) than I tried to swipe over the touchpad there and back a few times and saw the CPU usage rise quite a few percent (and so of course the battery discharge rate went up too). It was quite a spike I could see in the graph. I was also wondering that just this touchpad was making it consume more power. And it was Haswell Zenbook. I havent tried it on any other modern ultrabook though, you can test it out yourselves on your devices.

Still it might be the multitouch touchpads that drive the CPU usage up and thus consuming more power. But I would find it ridiculous that Intel puts so much effort to save a few Watts of power usage with latest billion dollar technology and then some "multi-whatever" touchpad just eats it all Fortunately the touchpad is being used for just a few % of the time spent working with the laptop.

I am curious how is it gonna behave under Windows 10. The situation could change quite a bit for the better with the latest devices.

 

Tried a few times. No luck getting the latest intel hd 5500 drivers installed. Also tired to enable legacy mode in the bios, as there are reports that some users having issues with getting those drivers installed that this worked for them. No luck.

 

airmt,

I feel like it's a drivers thing you know. But touchpad is the cuprit! IF you have a software run simulation without touchpad actually used, you can get 6whr/hr, sure. But that's flat out misleading!

 

Have you noticed any differences? From what I gathered, the issue seemed to be related to the screen itself, and not the light sensor.

 

Could you please clarify when does the fan kick in more? Was it when you switched back to QHD+? And with the 1600x900 it was more often in passive mode (web browsing)?
How does the 1600x900 look like on QHD+? I thought this is the second to best resolution after the native one as it is exactly half of it. Could you see any sings that it is not a native resolution - blurred text, unsharp contours etc.?
Many thanks for your response

 

Similar Question. Can OP with issue check if those things help?

Also, are other users noticing a similar issue with dimming/auto-brightness-- to the extent it is irritating? Or is it just personal issue?

 

Not sure how the fan behaves differently. It was only very slightly blurry to know it's not native resolution, but nothing that bad because screen itself is so small!

 

In the PCworld review they say 10 hours battery life for the QHD model, using the MobileMark 2014 benchmark. Is it any reliable or something?

 

Not sure how to test. From my use it does not seem to be dimming..

 

Where did you find the synaptics drivers for win7?

This is the worst trackpad I've ever used on a notebook, and I have a feeling since microsoft worked with synaptics to design it, the updates to software/firmware/drivers will take twice as long, if come at all.
I am extremely disappointed that the cursor slows down when I have a second finger on it trying to click. It makes my productivity drop because I have no idea where the cursor will move, it's unpredictable. Hopefully someone at Dell can address this issue.

And then scrolling..
Scrolling in IE is great, sure. But in Chrome makes it horribly laggy with delays, and my Dell Precision I previously had never experienced this problem

 

I'm also playing around with driver sources to find out if the problem can be resolved... Very very annoying indeed. Synaptics driver is available in Dell support website. It shows up as Dell touchpad.

 

Guys, any ideas how much Windows Defender would affect battery? Not really xps related but still important.
It is disabled by dell by default assuming we'll use McAfee.

 

Yup dell.com/drivers

Wait until this happens:

1. Keeps reverting settings back while you are using the touchpad. Only way to reinstallation.... Multiple times!

2. Now under battery mode it would straight up lag and stop working for split seconds. Not sure if electricity is getting to the parts!

3. NT Kernel & System on task manager pops 17-25% as soon as you touch the touchpad. This is the reason for the really terrible battery life on my Win 7 machine, including continued fan running..

 

Update:

While charging and using, the ac adapter gets VERY HOT. Like to a point you feel like burning if you hold with firm grip in your hand. I m sure they tested it ok, but giving yall an update.

 

Is ANYONE else having issues with Windows 7 and the Synaptics drivers?

After installations, the drivers keep screwing up the settings (after sudden lag in the touchpad) and it won't actually save settings.

I have to do clean reinstall and only takes few-couple mins to get back in this tragedy.

Not sure if this is Windows issue or what.. The drivers look pretty generic though..

 

Yeah you are right. That sucker get's pretty hot. It was walking a fine line of being unbearable to hold. Perhaps someone with softer or more sensitive hands might not be able to tolerate it. I need to find my infrared thermometer to see what temp it's running at.

 

What happened to this thread?

 

That's odd. My XPS 13 is getting charged now and I'm using it to type this post - the adapter doesn't feel hot. Mildly warm only (but this is a air-conditioned environment).