Dell XPS 13 Ultrabook Review & Owner's Thread

well, atm everything is scrolling properly again, and 4-finger swipe is good as well.

 

maybe it was a problem with your wifi router?

 

64. Works fine on my xps

 

Some new drivers out....


Quickset
USB3
Network

 

Don't update the audio driver unless you want to lose some sound level. The new driver reduced volume on my machine. Reinstalled the old driver and volume is back to where it was before the update.

 

A quick update:

The list I sent over is still being worked. I got some updates in the regular engineering quality report, but nothing really worth sharing of note, save for one minor item. If you hear a low level whine from your AC adapter, get it replaced. We have identified the root cause and switched to a different vendor. LiteOn is the one you need if you have the issue. You can get the adapter quickly and easily replaced using the links in my sig. If you just like to call tech support instead, they can replace the adapter as well.

 

Woops. Correction. There is something of note in the quality report.

The 92% battery thing has to do with "desktop battery mode." The purpose is to improve battery life (not charge, but length of usefulness) for users who rarely unplug the AC adapter. It manages the battery by charging and discharging the battery cycle internally (not sure what that means, exactly). Symptom: users will see the battery charge level drop to ~9x% when the adapter is unplugged. Work-around: discharge the battery to <7%, then charge back to full charge, which resets the trigger. We have an internal document for tech support coming to explain this, but I need to follow up on whether we have a robust customer-facing document in the works.

 

Bill,

Is that problem with the power supply dangerous? Because I live in Brazil, but bought the XPS 13 i7 early this month when I was in Florida. I have sucessfuly transfered the service tag and warranty to my country, but the xps13 have not been launched here yet.

I just put my ear over the AC adapter and I hear a high pitch sound coming from it.

 

Definitely not a safety issue. I would call that out explicitly, and we'd have a proactive replacement program in place if that were the case. Glad you asked, though. Don't want you to feel uncomfortable at all. When it launches in BR, you should be able to get a swap. If you encounter any problems at that time, get the agent's Rep ID, PM me, and I'll get someone in BR to get the information to the agent and the BR support org.

 

Sorry to be Mr Spammy today. Another update.

BIOS A04 coming soon to address the no charge indicator light in S3 state issue. Very soon.

 

Thank you a lot Bill, I'm really amazed the way Dell Customer Service works, especially you. The one reason along with the product quality of the product tha t is awesome and I could't help my self to not get it before released down here , was the possibility to transfer the warranty to Brazil.

I'm really glad to have a Dell. Keep up the good work! The noise is really low and I will have no problem waiting the Brazilian launch to do a swap.

PS: Do you have any words when it will be launched down here?

 

do you think we will get an ivy bridge XPS ultra book before July 1st

 

Didn't know that it was possible to transfer the warranty. I'm taking my xps back to Norway in a couple of months, so this is good news. Did you just called Dell CS in Brazil, gave them the service tag, and asked them to transfer it?

 

How do you access the Quick Set settings?

 

What is the driver for the ambient light sensor? I don't see it on Dell.com

 

Yup, it's on my adapter. Any reason to stop using it until I get a replacement?

 

It's pretty easy. You just need to go here http://www.dell.com/support/retail/us/en/19/ownershiptransfer/IdentifySystem

And follow the steps. In about 24 hours I received a confirmation email and my service tag country changed from US to Brazil. No need to call.

Sent from my GT-N7000 using Tapatalk

 

It looks like Dell uses the windows options now.... windows key + X brings up the mobility settings.

Right click on battery icon brings up power options, and mobility center is in lower left corner.

The new quickset driver gets rid of the icon in the systray completely.

 

Thank you, now if only I can figure out how to get the ambient light working!

 

Has anyone had any issue closing the flipper door on the bottom, where the service tag info is?

 

Yes its a bit rigid, try a couple of times if it doesn't seem to be closed correctly. In fact I almost pulled out a nail trying to get this thing to open!

 

My battery life is nowhere near claimed! Fully charged when I signed onto the Starbucks hotspot about 10 minutes ago and down to 3:35 according to Battery Pro toolbar. All I'm doing is web surfing and listening to iTunes. No programming or extensive video manipulations.

Whoever does battery life tests should be prosecuted for the liar he (or she) is.

 

Yeah me too! I'm currently sitting a highly lit Starbucks with lights directly above my table and my keyboard lights are on full bright. That has to be a battery killer!!! Have to manually turn it off using the Fn + F6 key.

 

So far I am getting between 4hr 30 min to a best time of just over 5 hours. I actually use Battery Pro toolbar as well and it actually has not proven to be accurate until the battery actually gets to about 20% or so.

In fact today I did a presentation for 2 hours, worked an additional 2 offsite and just nor plugged mine in at home after 40 minutes. So that was 4 hours a 40 minutes and I still listed 15 minutes of time left.

I am not doing anything special to get the time I do, so I have not clue why some are not getting better times. I never expect advertised battery life.

 

Anyone else having a problem not being able to adjust screen brightness when booting up after sleep? It happens sometimes, and neither keyboard shortcut or the brightness settings in control panel work.

 

No, first thing we checked. I have another dell laptop and a smartphone, and they did not experience the same proplems at all.

 

I bent mine on the first day I had it trying to get it to close after opening it. I was able to straighten it and closed it for good! It's a cool little place to hide the details but definitely difficult to open and close.

 

Apple is doing the same thing with the new iPad (and getting flack for it). Makes sense though.

 

I get the same thing. sometimes after booting up I'm not able to adjust brightness with shortcuts. haven't tried the control panel though, since the shortcut starts working after 10-15 secs or so. Not a big deal, but still..

 

Interesting, but i have not enabled desktop battery mode and i unplug mine when charged. I have it set to hibernate when it gets that low - so i guess i need to turn that off and let it run all the way down.

I know other laptops (including Dell) recommended calibrating batteries by doing a deep discharge - in the past.

 

Hello again,

I'll go through this thread over the weekend so apologies for not keeping up. The question I have is on max resolution support from the mini DP connection.

Have any of you connected a Dell U2711 to this machine and does it drive the native resolution of 2560x1440? Does it handle the native res for the U3011?

Second question, what adapter was used? I assume you are using a mini DP male to DP female adapter and plugging in a standard DP cable?

Thanks,

Thor

 

It's kind of tricky. What I've found is you have to insert the door at an angle with the edge nearer the rear of the system going in first. When that edge is properly seated, then you snap in the edge nearer the front of the system.

 

There are some technologies introduced in the 6230 card that are new and older cards do not have. It's very possible your older systems have no issues with the router, but the 6230 could. We saw this on the 14z and 15z. We worked very closely with Intel on this problem, and found a good portion of the users were able to resolve the problem after updating their router firmware, which the router manufacturer had updated to support the new features on the 6230. When you go to a public hotspot and have the issue, there's not much you can do. If only Starbucks baristas could do a quick firmware update on their routers...

 

Do you need a new door? Hit the links for @DellCares or Facebook in my sig to get one shipped out.

 

Yeah. Ummm. This feels like another issue we've discovered. I'm waiting for more online chatter on this one in order to provide details before escalating to engineering. You can all test it if you like.

Issue description going by what we know now:
Changing power management settings from as-shipped, then back to defaults by using the "restore defaults" button in advanced power settings does not restore factory defaults, but instead restores standard Windows defaults, which are different and could result in reduced battery charge life from original config.

 

Does anybody else notice either of the following weird issues with their XPS 13?

1) Windows "loose attention". For example, you're typing something in, and then suddenly you're not typing in the text box anymore, but typing into a void. Re-selecting the window fixes this. Seems to happen more often to me at the command prompt.
2) Touchpad stops working. Sometimes the touchpad will just not respond to anything unless I sit a twiddle my thumbs for a few seconds.

I'm trying to figure out if this is a driver issue or something else entirely. Any feedback would be great, even if you haven't noticed either of these.

Other than these quirks, I'm really in love with the product

 

I have the U2711 at home, and I love it!

Max resolution over Displayport is 2560x1600. That's the native resolution for the U3011 (which I had at work for a while, and loved almost as much as the U2711). You can use a male Mini Displayport to either female HDMI, DVI (but lower resolution), VGA (ditto lower res), or full Displayport.

 

Windows focus issue seems to have been corrected in the latest touch pad driver.

EDIT:

It seems the losing focus issue was not corrected in the touch pad driver, but seems to have something do to with the ambient light sensor. The current work around is to disable the sensor until we are able to come up with a proper fix.

 

Cool. Thanks for confirming. What specific adapter are you using with your U2711? I was thinking of ordering this monoproce.com adapter.

 

Thanks for the response! I re-installed the latest driver from the Dell website, hopefully that will fix my issue.

 

So, i got my battery recalibrate by doing what was recommended with other laptops: (i am not responsible if you break anything)

1. Go into BIOS and make sure laptop is not put into hibernate if it gest low:

Advanced-> intel rapid start-> Entry on S3 critical battery event (set to disabled)

2. Boot to windows and go into power savings and turn off sleep while on battery

3. Run down battery - i played 2 movies at one time on full bright and it took a few hours

4. when computer goes to sleep at around 5% you are close

5. wake from sleep and shutdown from windows

6. reboot into BIOS and leave screen up until computer shutsdown and will not turn on

7. Doing this from the BIOS avoids corrupting windows from a dirty shutdown

8. If machine will not turn on, plug in and fully charge

9. After fully charged, unplug and boot to windows

10. notice the 100% battery meter as you put things back to normal

11. remember to go back into bios and re-enable S3 critical as above

I have no idea if Dell approves of this method, but I am a firm believer in occassional (let me stress again) occasional, calibrating of battery. I am not conditioning the battery, but telling the OS what levels are full, and what are empty.

HTH

 

Wll, I think I may as well chuck in my 2p. I'm a UK user and got the product just over a week ago after having most probably the worst purchasing experiance I've ever had for a £1300 product. I remember the good old days when you called Dell in Ireland and you got your product the next day. Gone are these however; apparently there isn't an automated process to tell you that your online payment hasn't been suceessfull, despite getting the sucessful message through Verified by Visa and you're meant to sit for two days impatiently before calling customer services for them to tell you to try placing it again and see what happens, and that they know that there is no automated service to let you know that they haven't sucessfully placed your order... Then when you make the order by phone they take down your card details incorrectly and take another 24+ hours to call you and inform you of this. It's strange that when Amazon says 2 day delivery I get my £2 product in 2 days, but with Dell it takes a week from placing the order until you finally get what you ordered on release day. Anyway this isn't the point of the thread is it? I'll get a letter off to Dell UK about my moans...

So the product:

Got it and turned it on to make sure it works then reformatted it to get rid of the bloatware, well tried to... the windows disk didn't work.... I got around that by using another copy, apparently one is in the post but has yet to turn up. Latest BIOS and since updated all the drivers...

Touchpad - Much better with the new drivers but still overall poor. The two finger scroll still needs work as you all know but the tip about starting with two fingers and once you're scrolling using one helps. I too have the "missed clicks/taps" problem. One annoyance is that the track pad icon in the notification area is always on, even when you turn it off in the mouse options, a bit like the bluetooth icon was on Vista.

Screen - Yes then vertical angle is a bit poor but other than that it's all good. The auto dimming based on screen content is annoying at times but you can turn that off in windows power settings. I don't think my ambient light sensor works... but then again I'm sure I've seen the keyboard lights off during the day at some point. The glossy hard screen is much easier to live with than matt finish and finger prints come off more easily (just like a phone). I do however suffer from the problem where you cannot adjust the screen brightness after booting from sleep sometimes, you can't even adjust it in windows; you move the slider but nothing happens! The steps at the lower end of the scale are a bit big though, setting 3 is much much brighter than setting 2 and in the room I'm in 2 is too dark and 3 too bright! This needs some linearisation.

Keyboard - If you dont like the font dont buy it... My friends who are macboi's commented on the "cool font" immediately. I've got sticky right shift key if I press the bottom edge- anyone else? I'll try an air line on it incase it's dirt but failing that I'll need to get it replaced. I don't like the amount of light bleed around the keys, especially the left shift key and the uneven bleed on the F-keys (F7 and F8 have no bleed but the others all do!!!). This really lets it down IMHO. I cannot get the caps lock key to light it's indicator up after I reinstalled - saying that I've not installed quickset; does it drive that light?

Power light - it's a bit too big and bright. I' say make it half the size but the same light output per unit area. Minor issue really....

Network Drivers - well the shocking 1megbyte throughput from my NAS drive has been 100% improved to a whopping 2MB! Wireless says I'm running at 78Mb so 2MB throughput is really pretty shocking! I'm using a Linksys E4200 router.

Sound drivers - The update resolved a big problem for me. When I plugged in my good ol' amp (low level input) the laptop didnt recognose that there was an input active. The new drivers fixed that but unfortunately this revealed that although the laptop sound is rather good for something so small, when you hook it up to a proper amp and speakers the sound is, quite frankly, rubbish. I'm coming from an X-Fi Prelude so the bench is pretty high, I wasn't expecting audiophile quality but this is disappointingly low...

Battery life - I recon I'm in the 5-6 hour regeion when using it fairly light witha bit of file transfering and driver installing etc... I'm happy with it. One thing I would comment on is that the recharge time is pretty poor if you are using the laptop whilst charging it.

Power supply - when disconnected from the laptop it makes quite a loud noise - Is the new part being rolled out in the UK too Bill?

That noise people are complaining about - I dont think it is the hard drive or fan, I believe that it is the screens backlight driver. Change the brightness and the tone changes, turn the screen off and it goes away. This really is pretty diappointing. In a quiet room I can pick up the noise just like I can hear a HDD spinning, I'm sure this wont be the case for most people but to me it's like a fly stuck on a window. I expected this unit to be virtually silent and it's not. The type of noise it is suggests a component is either poor quality or not mounted correctly and is vibrating, not an issue I'd expect in a modern premium product... - Any idea if this is being investigated Bill? If a problem is found will a replacement be rolled out? Worldwide?

Temps/Fan - It gets a bit warm sure, but it's fine as far as I'm concerned. My old inspiron 9100 with a 3.2GHz P4 knew how to pump out he heat so anything is acceptable after that

I guess I should wrap this up as I'm dragging it out a bit but my closing comments are that overall I am happy with the product. I'm sure driver fixes will be rolled out to resolve the touch pad, wireless and light sensor. It's a bit bigger than I thought it would be, I guess I wanted a XPS 12Z but since it doesn't exist this will do for now So I think it's time to biff off my old modified Vostro 200 as it'll never get turned on again now I've got this....

In one line - Good effort, keep up the good work and resolve the minor issues and this thing will be as good as I need it to be.


Has anyone bought the Dell Leather Sleeve? I want a nice leather sleeve but at £45 I want to make sure it's worth it before buying!

Great fourm and the Dell support on here for you US guys is outstanding!

Oh one final thing... The Dell drivers site needs to have the driver up for about 24 hours before I can ever download it, it just says "file not found" when I click on the download like through the UK and US sites. Anyone else got this issue?

 

Not that I'm aware of. The sound is due to a component being out of spec, but it's not so far out of spec to be a safety issue, or they would have handled the messaging differently.

 

Never connected any of my units to the 27, but that one should work. I did see a very funny issue at SXSW. The event crew had a couple dozen XPS 13 units they were using to power projectors in various panels and rooms. They were using Apple branded Mini-Displayport-to-VGA dongles that would not display video on the projector. They dug around in their crates and found a different brand of the same dongle type, which worked fine. They were just about to hand some SXSW staff guy an Amex card to run out and buy all the dongles he could find when another guy digging in the crates found the other branded ones.

 

That's exactly how I would do it, with the benefit of your posting the BIOS tip. The guidance I was given was just "tell them to run the battery down and recharge to 100%," which is fine. But I like how you called out running the last mile in BIOS. Repped.

Edit
Correction: Will rep when able. Need to rep some of the other awesome folks on this thread first.
"You must spread some Reputation around before giving it to alphadog00 again."

 

Yes.

Depending on your E4200 version, you may want to try a firmware update. Ver.1.0.04 (Build 11) is out for version 1.0, and Ver.2.0.36 is out for version 2.0.

Long recharge time can be attributed to the wattage rating of the adapter. We wanted to keep it small and light, so it's not going to provide quick charge mega uber power juice. Unfortunately, this is a non-standard Dell adapter, so there isn't a higher wattage piece you can re-purpose from another platform for the XPS 13.

Yes. The inventory purge was global and all regions reported completion on 3/17 or so.

This is not being looked at from the systemic level, because it's not hitting us hard in social media or the contact centers at this time. That could be an indication of a faulty capacitor in the motherboard or display. I would suggest you contact EMEA tech support and get the symptoms evaluated (code for have the tech guess what the problem is, since we've provided them no documentation on the issue as of yet.) If we hit a severity threshold and find root cause, we will have an actionable plan in place for tech support worldwide.

 

I'm currently waiting for a new unit because om my double-letter keyboard. As mentioned before, I have that noise which jammy is pointing out. If my new unit has the same sound, both are going back. As a student I'm doing a lot of work in quiet surrounding, and this noise is driving me crazy. Might be the backlight or ssd, i don't know.. either way it's something i can't live with.

 

@jammy86

I have the 4200 v1 running 1.0.03 - thanks Bill for the update info...

I get ~7.8 MB (~64 Mb) transfer speed - so I know the router and XPS 13 play nice. If I switch to 5ghz N frequency I get about 11 MB/s - Using a network monitoring tool - I can see over 400mb/s.

For such a low speed, you either have a wireless interference issue, or mismatch in duplex/speed if your router and NAS are wired together. Neighbor with cordless phone, or microwave can interfere with wireless. try changing channels on router.

 

Will this system have a Ivy Bridge refresh??

 

This summer.