Dell XPS 15 (9550) list of hardware and software problems

Thanks for your reply. I searched the thread for "fan" and not much came up. Where do you have that information from?

 

I think his conclusion is totally reasonable. All of the XPS 9550s I've worked with (22) have done this same thing. It's fairly logical to think that the fans would spin up to help cool down the whole system. Ever feel how hot your cell phone gets when it's doing the fast charge cycle?

 

0 out of 22 and an estimated 2 out of 40. Evidence is mounting in favor of it being normal behavior.

 

Do you guys hear a slight coil whine when the the fan is on? With mine there is the sound of the air being pushed out and on top of that there's higher pitch sound.

 

No nothing. I am very sensitive to all those sounds, but there are absolutely no strange sounds on my laptop.

 

Helpful answer come in fast on this forum. I definitely hear a whiney sound on top of the flowing air which is probably why I noticed the fans during the charge process even more.

 

Hello !

I have a USB disk enclosure (Icy Box IB-254U3). When I start a transfer the speed goes down after 10 seconds and then the transfer freeze.
I suspect that the USB ports on this XPS doesn't have enough power.
Anyone got a problem like that ?

Also my screen goes black time to time. I have to long press the power button to restart.

It's my second XPS and my motherboard was already replaced.

 

My first XPS went black randomly too, in my case I had to replace it since it also happened during a Windows reinstall.

 

Anyone else with good ears hear nothing else but the airflow of the fans?

 

I don't hear anything besides fans, but I was in the army for a few years, lol

 

Reading the 9550 threads from the beginning, grab a drink and a snack then settle in for a few hours reading, 2 is generous, I know one person said it not sure if it was 2.

Slight when your ears to the laptop, totally inaudible otherwise (without fans on)

I hear the fans but used to go to raves in the 90's (back when you bought a cassette tape after the rave) so I now live with tinnitus and say pardon a lot :\

If you want coil whine go listen to a 9530!

 

I once heard nearly everyone's got an ear noise when put into a quiet room. I was actually wondering if it was just me, but there's reallye a coil whine. If it were only that smooth flow of air, it would actually remind me of the ocean. Now it's like being at the ocean - with a bigass moscito.

Anyone else hear the moscito?

 

My USB C adapter makes a high pitched whine when it is connected & the laptop is sleeping, but not when it is connected & the laptop is on. Slightly annoying, because when I sleep the laptop is often when I want to sleep myself & don't want the whine!

 

Howbout when you multitask four 1080p youtube videos and the fan begins to kick in. That's when the whine occurs with mine.

 

Hi. I've the same problem with my XPS 15 9550 (i7, FHD, 16 GB RAM, 512 SSD PM951) and I think it's a problem with the new generation of the Intel CPUs (Skylake). I will sent back the machine to Dell.

So, a change of the mainboard doesn't fix the problem with coile whining.

 

Hi, I have the exact same notebook. With mine it seems to be closely coupled with the fans. I think I might try to replace it one more time.

 

I've not noticed coil whine when running heavy tasks (like batch exporting from Premiere/After Effects), maybe I am just one of the lucky ones.

 

I'll just keep on playing the Dell Roulette

 

If you guys could put on 4 or 5 youtube vids at the same time and then describe what you hear once the fans kick off, that would be much appreciated. Is it just a low frequency air sound or is there also a higher pitch accompanying sound

 

just tried this for the heck of it.

- 9550 is connected via Displayport/USB-C to a 3440x1440 display
- already have photoshop (three files: two small files, one abt 150MB) and indesign (two files) running
- Edge browser streaming a radio station (adblockers on Chrome won't let allow this stream)
- Chrome browser with 10 tabs open

proceeded to open four brand new Chrome windows, each loaded with a different YouTube video

result: NO CHANGE in barely audible fan noise.

but this i mean:
- no "low frequency air sound"
- no "higher pitch accompanying sound"
- if i put my ear very close to the notebook, i can hear the fan(s), but it is so quiet that the buzz from my desk lamp is probably 5 times louder.
- my notebook is almost always pretty much silent like this. the last time i recall my fans ramped up was when i was updating my bios. easily the quietest notebook i've ever had.

 

Great info. Thanks for trying it out. Yours seems to be particularly quiet.

 

Anybody with HDD/SSD Password option in BIOS?

My XPS15 9550 with PM951 looks like this in BIOS:

 

Apart from the fact that you're not supposed to double-post, your question really has nothing to do with either thread you posted in.

If you're really looking help, try creating your own post.

 

I have a new 9550 and very pleased with it.

The only issue I am having (so far...) is the opposite to what several people have reported here.
Rather than not waking up from sleep, it won't go to sleep unless I force it via the power option on the start menu.

It has the default settings. But closing the lid or leaving it unattended has no impact - come back hours later and it has not gone to sleep.
The screen goes off, but the machine is not going to sleep. (when I return it is not asking me to log in again)

The annoying this is that if I am running on battery, it simply drains my battery away.

I can only presume something running in the background fools the machine into thinking it is still in use.

Ideas?

 

Another question.
My previous Dell had an option to prevent the battery from being over-charged whjen it was just primarly on mains power.
But I dont see that on the 9550 power options.
It is no longer a problem?

 

They are now part of BIOS(UEFI) settings.

 

I have the same issue - I will seemingly reliably get a crash with CRITICAL PROCESS DIED when I close the lid and reopen it 20 seconds later (Win 10 Pro, 4k display, 512GB PM951 drive)

I have the latest BIOS in AHCI mode and have removed Intel Rapid Storage but loaded its AHCI drivers and the Samsung NVMe controller

 

this is a known . semi known issue. there are various sleep/hibernate/shutdown issues where it either wont sleep, or goes to sleep only to restart a few seconds later and boot up again

 

Also Dell power management.

 

This fixed my computer hitching when waking the mic: http://forum.notebookreview.com/threads/a-fix-for-xps15-9550-sound.789338/

 

Strangely, although this issue was plaguing me all of Friday, it hasn't done it at all over the weekend. I wish if it was going to be buggy it would at least be consistent :3

 

I am having a weird issue where restarting the computer seems to take longer than it should. The screen remains black for at least twenty seconds and then it goes to the login screen. I seem to notice it after restarting once I put the computer to sleep. Anyone know what might be causing this?

 

I have had the laptop for a few months now - great for gaming!

Does anyone have the issue with connecting the headset, If I connect it and listen to anything it works fine however as soon as I disconnect it and re-connect it will not work at all until I restart the laptop.

 

I just received my 9550 and did all the updates, and notice that it takes forever to get to the DELL logo screen on a warm reset (I don't use sleep) too. From a fresh power on, it's about 10-15 seconds but a restart takes 3x that just to get the Dell logo (and sometimes even longer because the Dell logo goes away, then pauses and shows the Dell logo again then the spinny dots showing it's loading.

Maybe someone who has had theirs longer knows if maybe the latest BIOS could be the cause?

 

are you another one installing the samsung 950pro driver?

 

I did not install the 950 Pro driver or have the machine in AHCI. It has the drivers supplied by windows and Dell only. Do you have any idea what the problem could be? I may also send this 9550 back.

 

Hi guys, I've just got my xps 15 9550 and mayby this is stupid but there is something strange. Settings/Storage shows me i use 53GB out of 476GB ! Is it normal 476GB? I thought it should be 53 out of 512. Is there something wrong with my ssd 512?

 

That's normal. It's a long story but a 512GB drive is 512 x 1000MB instead of 512 x 1024MB so total capacity comes out less. In other words 476GB x 1.024 = 512GB. Every SSD or HDD is advertised that way.

 

That is wrong. 476 * 1024 = 487.4 and not 512.

The size of any storage device is given in Gigabytes (GB) or Terabytes (TB), but computers do use Gibibytes (GiB) or Tebibytes (TiB).
1 GB = 10^9 bytes = 1.000.000.000 bytes
1 GiB = 2^30 bytes = 1.073.741.824 bytes

Using math to transform from GB to GiB:
512 GB * (1.000.000.000 bytes/GB) / (1.073.741.824 bytes/GiB) = 476,837158203125 GiB

Long story short:
- People incorrectly use International System prefixes for computer-related stuff
- For any given size, divide it by 1,0737, and you will get the actual value.

Sorry for the off-topic explanation. Your drive is perfectly fine

 

> The size of any storage device is given in Gigabytes (GB) or Terabytes (TB),

> People incorrectly use International System prefixes for computer-related stuff

I see. Except I would define 'people' as 'most manufacturers'. Although your math is right it should be pointed out that there were times when 1 GB was 1 GB, not less. Until some arseholes in hard drive manufacturing discovered they could use the GIB logic to advertise their smaller drives with higher storage numbers. THAT is the only reason we have this ****ty confusion today.

 

hey, thought i would chime in with a test of this too.

i'm on BIOS 1.1.19.

restart:
@ 0 seconds: Dell logo + kb light up.
@ 4-5 seconds: spinning dots
@ 10-11 seconds: log-in screen

so it's probably just a couple seconds (if that) difference between a cold boot and a warm reset for me.

one thing of note that i don't think anyone has mentioned: hibernation. i killed it on this box, since i would never use it.

 

Not really, I think people are the problem. I have never heard anyone talk about Gibibytes. Not only non-IT users, but also IT ones, have been mistakenly using Mega/Giga/Tera for ages, but computers have always used Mebi/Gibi/Tebi and never Mega/Giga/Tera.

But I agree that manufacturers took advantage of this confusion to create slightly smaller drivers, despite their advertisement is not wrong. They advertise GB/TB and that is what they give to the consumer.

 

Hi !

My XPS 9550 (FHD/16GB/84WH/512GB) is dead again !
I received my first XPS 1 month ago and it was dead out of the box. The second was dead after two hours. They change my motherboard but 3 days later, boum.
Always the same problem : the screen goes black and the laptop won't reboot (orange led and blinking underscore, no dell logo anymore). When that happened I was watching a tv show on battery with nothing attached to the laptop.

I use Windows 10 Education (I have a licence and I use some features wich aren't available on Home edition) without Secure Boot and I use almost all last drivers from Dell except the Samsung NVMe driver and Intel IGP/Nvidia GPU. I tried both AHCI and RAID, no Thunderbolt.

I'm starting to get very very angry about this piece of crap. I also had multiple freezes and black screen before it dies.
I'm still hesitating between get a full refund or get a replacement unit again and wait him to die again.

 

I need a piece of advice. I've already done update of BIOS (01.01.19) and diagnostic test from the Dell support website but i wonder what else should i do/particulary update at the begining of use my xps.

 

I've been having problems since I first got this machine with it waking up from sleep. After a lot of event viewer fiddling I've found out that every time the computer sleeps only to wake itself there is an error from microsoft-windows-stordiag stating "Completing a failed non-ReadWrite SCSI SRB request". Any ideas about this? I haven't dug up anything about a solution.

 

Following up own post with the outcome of two phone calls and some testing over the past few days or so.

My laptop appears to work fine on BIOS 1.1.15. I extensively used the laptop for several hours (including leaving it switched on overnight) without a single 'black screen' lock-up. I rolled forward to BIOS 1.1.19 on Friday morning prior to my expected call from Dell that morning and sure enough after about 5 - 10 minutes, the system locked up.

Dell called as promised and after discussing the issue further, I was assured that the issue would be passed on to the BIOS development team. In the meantime, I was asked to roll back (again) to 1.1.15 and test the laptop for a longer period and a further follow-up call was booked for this afternoon (Tuesday).

I rolled back the firmware and used the laptop almost constantly over the weekend with zero issues. I have just finished talking to Dell (who called me back as promised - I don't think I've ever had a company do that before) and it was basically the same as on Friday - Dell rep will escalate to the product team who will look at the issue further. They have promised to get back to me with any news on that front. In the meantime, I have been advised to continue to use the laptop on 1.1.15.

I was passed to the rep's manager who just wanted to know if i was happy with the service I had received (which I was). He also tried to suggest that now that the laptop was working fine, I was presumably happy. I pointed out that I was most certainly not happy with the laptop and that I reserved the right to reject it if Dell could not fix this particular issue (quoting the UK's Consumer Act 2015 at him).

Sorry for the long missive but I thought I would detail my (and Dell's) efforts to get to the bottom of the issue as I know others are suffering the same fault. Having said that, other than rolling the BIOS version back and forth, I haven't actually done much.

 

Just had a another call from Dell and they've said they are going to replace my motherboard - tomorrow. After much keyboard crunching at their end, I was advised that the part may not be available in which case they will let me know and reschedule.

We shall see!

 

Is the sleep issue hardware or software related? If i have it, would it be worth exchanging, or should I just wait for a software update? Thanks!

 

I also had problems with waking up from sleep/hibernation. The problem in my case was the BIOS setting used to disable AHCI. Leave the SATA ports and AHCI enabled.

 

No, just plain fat no. Phone em back and say you are not going to have a brand new laptop ripped apart by a partially trained contractor paid by the job not by the hour (meaning quality of service is low as it is about quantity and an early finish) to replace it with a 2nd hand (it is not refurbished unless they class that as throwing it in a box) motherboard.

Demand nothing less than a new build as it's pretty bloody obvious it is a BIOS issue as an older one fixes it but Dell support are flipping useless at this sort of thing.
It will never be the same again if you let them loose on a full rebuild.