Dell XPS 13 Ultrabook Review & Owner's Thread

I totally understand you. It's the business ethics that is in conflict with our own personal principle. It's not about the money. It's how they just nick it from your wallet. It's no different in principle from a pick pocket thief.

I know most here thinks they make enough money and is not bothered about Dell nicking small hidden amounts here and there. So far there is no favourites in Brand names anymore. I will just choose from the best model they make and comment from real people. Not paid blogs or paid marketing reviews.

 

My HP Folio 13 came with a SATA 2 SSD drive. So did my Envy 14 Spectre. I don't believe HP is shipping SATA 3 drives in their consumer notebook lines.

 

I think this is correct.

The only other notebook I've seen with the Samsung SATA 3 drive is the new 2012 Series 9, US version. I think the UK has shipped with SanDisk? Ouch.

 

@Dell-Bill_b

Is the Quickset task tray icon (not working) being looked at too? Going to c:\progfiles\dell\quickset and clicking quickset.ext launches windows mobility center - i assume this is what it is supposed to do?

 

this thread is pretty difficult for someone to walk into. Perhaps split it up among reviews, troubleshooting, prospective buyer quetions and suggested improvements?

 

I just know that after I disabled ambient light detection, it doesn't lose focus at all anymore (and honestly I don't really miss it much anyway because I like doing that manually). I tested this out without my hands anywhere near the laptop and it still lost focus. Does it have to do with hands at all or do the algorithms freak out on their own? Also I noticed that if you change the backlighting (even manually) it'll lose window focus so I thought that the ambient light was changing the backlighting and thus losing the focus.

I returned mine absolutely no problem. Explained that I didn't want it and it took a matter of minutes to return it. My rep emailed me my ups shipping sticker and I was good to go with a full refund so I guess it just depends on your rep.

 

I did some checking on the measurements, the MacBook Air 13" looks to be very close in size to the Dell XPS 13.

I just ordered my Knomo sleeve! I decided on UPS ground shipping, not sure where it ships from, but it should just be a few days early next week at the latest. It looks like a very nice product. Thanks again for the tip apatz!

 

I had the exact same experience. At first I suspected the trackpad so I took my hands away and it was still losing focus.

 

Lisa G (pdagal), could you provide any details on the trackpad driver you're testing? What's better about it?

If I don't get the trackpad scrolling issue resolved soon, I'm returning my XPS 13. Scrolling is essential to my productivity and it's currently totally unusable with any of the 3 drivers I tried.

The other major issue I have is a high-pitched noise from the power adapter when the laptop is in sleep. It oscillates in time with the fading white light in the front of the machine. Anyone else notice this? From what I read, people have been complaining about the SSD's constant high-pitched noise, but what I'm describing is much much louder, and it goes up and down so it's horribly obnoxious.

 

How/Where i can get Skype Premium subscription ?
i didnt find in box.

 

Ok using today's currency converter....£1300 is the equivelent of $2041 USD.
That's a 26% loading

 

I believe that it is available via the "Dell Digital Delivery app"

 

Any Australians/Kiwi's in here who have purchased theirs? Whats the ETA for delivery looking like?

 

Just wanted to let everyone know that the Timbuk2 Custom Envelope Sleeve in Small is a nice fit, not real tight, but the laptop doesn't slide around inside. Timbuk2 makes some great bags!!

 

Can you guys look into the Intel PROSet Wireless folder from All Programs for an applet called "WiFi Event Viewer," please? Go to the settings tab and enable wireless event logging. When it drops a couple of times, see if you can pull that log and post it back here.

Thanks.

 

Resolution is higher with more precise finger tracking and I don't have problems with it missing simple taps. It tracks my finger well. Two finger scrolling now works well (before it was terrible). Palm rejection is supposedly much improved, but I honestly haven't had troubles with it before, so I can't speak to that.

 

I'm told "the driver will appear this week," but no one wants to commit to a date just yet. If it's not up by Friday mid-day, I'll request a solid date and post back what I hear.

I'm on record about this on this thread I think. Higher resolution panels are being considered for the mid life kicker release.

What's hidden? Pretty straight forward implementation of trial ware that most PC vendors use. It took me a total of like 5-10 minutes to decline McAfee, download and install Windows Security Essentials and grab all the updates. Free solution that's only hidden because MSFT lost an anti-trust case. How does Samsung do it? No trial A/V? Can't imagine that. Do they have a paper clip man pop up and explain when and how charges might be incurred? An animated EULA? /snarky (just playing around. no offense.)

How are we off on price? Sure there are cheaper Ultrabooks, but they are, in fact, cheaper Ultrabooks. I've looked at all of them side by side except the Spectre, and my opinion means nothing since I'm paid by Dell, but seriously, there's a quality gap that's pretty evident. More expensive materials cost more, point blank.

This promotion was intended from the start to be a free throw in with the system purchase. We shot ourselves in the foot with the way we created the 2 SKU's. First, you need a SKU for the item to ship or be replaced. Every SKU has a dollar amount assigned to it. For some reason, at launch someone decided to use the normal retail price to assign the dollar amount to the hot spot SKU, then subtract that amount from the base system price to get both items to the $999/$1299/$1499 price points. This has created confusion and a bit of consternation for our customers. Sorry for that. We since changed the SKU value to some smaller amount and adjusted the base SKU. I think the promotion has ended altogether at this point. If you still don't like the explanation, I totally understand. The best way to get a refund processed is to reach out to our social media team. They can be found on Twitter at @DellCares and on Facebook.com/Dell via the "support" link on the left.

That's exactly what it's supposed to do. Why they chose this method is beyond me. I don't know why it can't just be a WinMoCtr icon in the tray. The bottom line is it puts mobility center a click away, so there's that.

I didn't get a chance to test this last night, but I will. I'm not drawing any conclusions yet, but I now have 2 theories to prove/disprove. I definitely saw the symptom at SXSW this weekend. Just once though.

 

Clarification on screen resolution for upcoming releases:

We are looking into it. Nothing is decided at this point. We're listening to feedback and assessing the viability. We'll do our best to balance our engineering and supply issues with the need for higher resolution screens. It may be cut in at mid life. It may be cut in after mid life. It may never make it, but again, we are seriously looking at it.

 

@pdagal I just spoke to my team mate, Anne, and got the inside scoop on your screen name. Awesome! I miss Axim.

 

Dell-Bill_B you're the bomb!

 

Here s what i m wishing for :

13" high definition AND good QUALITY screen (if possible no glossy)
Ivy Bridge
SSD 256
8 GIG RAM (yes, don't ask me why)
ETHERNET Gigabyte
USB2 AND USB 3.0 (some periph are non compatible with USB3)
No second hand bugs (wifi, fan noise...) PRETTY please !
​

 

It already has USB 2.0 and USB 3.0.

 

Yes said that to be sure, they don't go everything 3.0

 

Are there some USB devices that cannot work connected to a USB 3.0 port? I thought USB 3.0 was backward compatible with USB 2.0 devices.

 

Yes, I should really change my screen name since PDAs have gone the way of dinos, but I've been pdagal here for years, and hate to change it. Anne's awesome, BTW! Miss her from those Axim days.

 

Ok. I will do it tonight. It's a little annoying but not a deal breaker for me. It takes a few seconds to turn the wireless on and off with the hotkey. What is a little strange is that when I try to use the MS built in wireless troubleshooter, it finds no problems with the internet connection. I will post the log when it happens again.

*sigh* I broke one of the holder metal tabs on the panel that covers the Dell Service Tag. Totally my fault for being too rough. Oh well at least it has another one holding the panel in place. I tried using metal glue but no dice. I guess it has to be soldered for adequate strength. Maybe down the road I will be able to purchase another panel.

The 15z Touchpad drivers are a great improvement over the stock drivers. I did notice that the newer driver made the CPU utilization jump up more than the older drivers. The stock drivers still crashed on resume from sleep for me but I migrated to the 15z drivers so who cares.

Surprisingly I got used to the CPU fan. It's a fan and is supposed to blow when it gets hot. The A02 bios was a great improvement. I noticed it stays on longer when the AC adapter is plugged in (internals probably get hotter from the battery charging) and when I have it on my lap in bed (hotter from my thighs). When I have it on my desk it turns on sparingly.

I wish it has a SD card reader but i can use a portable reader. Little growing pains here and there but that happens with new technology. As a whole I love my XPS 13.

 

I can imagine this is true. I don't have a desk at home, at all.... I always is my notebook on the couch, in a chair, or in the bed. So it's always striving for air.

 

But...it's....just....so....tempting.

How much faster is RAM than a swap file on a SATA3 SSD? Serious question that I honestly do not know.

If you look at the mobo in the tear down guide, you can see where we put the memory modules on the board. 8GB will take up twice the space. We'd have to cut something out or down for double the modules. I don't see shaving battery cells or ports for more RAM. Perhaps I lack the proper engineering imagination... Thoughts?

Edit:

A colleague saw my post and points out there may be smaller RAM die sizes coming, and we're looking into this. I could verify what we're doing, but I won't bother requesting the information. I know whatever we're doing is something I couldn't talk about publicly anyway, so I'll remain blissfully ignorant for now.
Of interest (though a bit out of date): http://www.chipworks.com/en/technic...ing-inside-samsungs-3x-nm-process-generation/

 

I'm having very temperamental wifi problems as well. The connection can drop over 7 times in an hour. My work is almost entirely on the web, and it's a deeply jarring experience when you click on something and get an "unable to load page" error (or similar). Unfortunately I removed the Wifi Connection Utility which probably explains why I don't have the event logger, so I can't grab a log for you .

About the Quickset icon in the taskbar: it's strange that it doesn't do anything whether you left- or right- click on it. I uninstalled it once, but found that the HUD for the media functions (wifi/brightness/volume) disappeared with it, so I kept it the second time around. Is it supposed to respond and load up the mobility center when you click on it? Cause it's not doing it.

Lastly, has anyone been able to create system images using the built in Backup and Restore facility? I'm getting an I/O device error when saving the image and I'm not sure it's my external hdd's problem because I have used that same hdd for three system images from my previous laptop. I was reading (very briefly) on the internet and there were mentions about a 4096 byte sector size on certain hdds and Windows backup not being designed to run on such disks unless the hdd supports a 512 sector size emulation. ( what??)

I hope to get a system image done so I can finally remove the 15gb and 8gb partitions and get a bit more local disk space.

 

That makes a lot of sense.

 

A friend of mine had several hardware failures on his laptop over a couple of years. I couldn't understand why, until I saw how he used it: laptop resting on a couch cushion. If your laptop can't breathe and cool, then overheating is almost certain and damage is more likely.

 

When I was troubleshooting the issue I did the following and it got better:

1. I completely removed the WiFi drivers that were preinstalled and used the drivers from Dell's website.

2. I was using MAC address exclusion on my WiFi router (Netgear N600) for added security. I turned that off.

I am not sure if that helped but now it happens only once in a while.

 

What's a PDA?



I actually had the first/original Palm Pilot. I loved it!

 

Have you tried the drivers direct from intel? I used those when I rebuilt my XPS 13 and the WiFi is rock solid

 

Yup! My wife leaves her laptop on the bed and the couch all the time. When I pick it up the spot is on fire! I know it's going to prematurely kill it.

 

That's a really good idea. I will try them when I get home tonight.

 

You mean these?

I just grabbed the top one. I tried the drivers-only .exe first and a wifi icon loaded up and blinked its lights at me. The wifi reset once, then the icon disappeared and nothing. Hopefully it worked . Thanks for the tip!

 

1440 x 900 on a 13"er would be most appreciated. Well, by me anyway.

 

That's the one, I also installed proset (not drivers only) but I doubt that makes a difference.

 

newbie question:
Where can I find and uninstall the existing keyboard drivers, and where can i find new drivers? Under input drivers on dell.com i only find cypress trackpad drivers and for wireless keyboard. Trying to fix my double letter/non-registering keystroke problems

 

PROSet is good to have for the event logs. I can always point our Intel contacts to a posted log. They are the ones requesting a look at your logs now. As soon as you guys post them, I'll have Dell and Intel eyeballs on the logs.

 

Awesome, release an upgraded XPS 13 with a better screen and Ivy Bridge and I am sold!

 

Dell-Chris_M should be sending you a PM shortly to get service tag and shipping info to replace that system badge. Don't worry about buying one. I can see how it broke. Kinda wonky how the L-shaped rail thingy is soldered on. What I've found is you have to make the edge nearest the rear of the laptop seated flush before you snap the front edge in place.

Touch pad driver supposed to fix everything. Gestures will be disabled by default in the new driver, so you have to go in and enable them. The "reviewer" from The Verge posted an update on how he feels about the new driver. Evidently it gives him warm and fuzzy Macbook Air-like tingles all over, so he rates it just above meh.

A03 fixes the fan to most people's liking from what I gather. I have not tested it yet, but hope to find the time tonight. BIOS and touch pad driver are coming shortly.

 

Third report I've seen of this. Would you mind if we try a keyboard swap onsite first? I might be able to string a capture and whole unit exchange together as well, if you'd rather.

 

Dell-Bill B, I just received my 2nd xps13. The first unit had a issue where after resuming from sleep the display would be dim, even though everything in the power management menu was set to max. The dell tech even couldn't figure it out when he remotely logged in. So decided to send me a 2nd unit.

I am still having this problem with the 2nd unit. After resuming from sleep the display is still dim!.

I can't believe no one else is having this issue?!. Any advice ?

 

Can you see what happens if you disable the ambient light sensor?

 

I don`t mind trying a onsite swap. Do you think it`s possible to swap to a keyboard with scandinavian layout while we`re at it? How should i proceed?

 

Ugh. I take it you're not in North America? If that's the case, all I can advise is contacting tech support in your region and reporting the issue. Hopefully, they will try some troubleshooting steps and send out a tech with a new keyboard. If that doesn't fix it, they generally will try a motherboard next and a whole unit exchange if all else fails. Generally. I can't speak for individual techs, especially in regions outside North America.

 

No, I`m in North America, Canada. Actually, a swap of the whole unit might be best. Since this seem like a rare problem, the probability of receiving a unit with the same problems should be slim.

 

Hi Bill I turned off the ambient light sensor via \program files\dell\quickset\backlitkb . Still have the issue.

However I noticed that is mainly for the keyboard, is there another place I can disable the light sensor ?