Dell XPS 15 (Skylake) 9550 Owner's Lounge

This is the paradox of the 9550. The 1080 FHD screen is already obsolete. The 4k screen is ahead of the application and even the OS support. You take your pick. Personally, I'd rather buy for next year than last year, especially at these prices.

 

Wish this was true but it's more like next 4 years, if we are lucky. That's what I told myself each time I brought a new MacBook Pro for the last 3 years since Apple released the Retina lineup. But the developer of applications like AutoCAD, Revit, DiaLux, PowerCAD just didn't bother with HiDPI support. Even some of Microsofts own application doesn't scale properly. Finally I gave up and sold my MacBook and placed an order for XPS15 with FullHD. Hopefully I won't be disappointed.


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Wish this was true but it's more like next 4 years, if we are lucky. That's what I told myself each time I bought a new MacBook Pro for the last 3 years since Apple released the Retina lineup. But the developer of applications like AutoCAD, Revit, DiaLux, PowerCAD just didn't bother with HiDPI support. Even some of Microsofts own application doesn't scale properly. Finally I gave up and sold my MacBook and placed an order for XPS15 with FullHD. Hopefully I won't be disappointed.


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Well, obviously, one would want to buy for the next year., but whats the point if the system is not usable ? ... I was searching various forums for DPI related issues people have reported for individual apps (eg: Classic Media Player or Flash Player for firefox.) -- its been reported as bugs/issues for over 1+ year now, but........ those simple issues are NOT yet fixed..

The only reason I bought the 4k model was to future proof and my plan was to run it in FHD mode in the near future (1+ year), but FHD mode down-scaling looks pathetic all blured-up. Not crisp as one would expect.

Are there any tools/apps which can be used to down-scale the 4k to FHD with crisp display?

 

Hello,

I uninstalled the Intel drivers and that hosed my system (I should have asked before doing this - my bad). After uninstalling it couldn't see my drive on boot. I realize I could have just loaded the drivers and then found a previous restore point. I'm reinstalling and windows doesn't see the disk unless I f6 and use the intel RST - how are you uninstalling them as it doesn't look like MS has native drivers.

 

Is it normal for the fan to be on even if the cpu is under 5%? Sometimes I am just browsing the internet and the fan would turn on and make this really loud and notable sound.

 

If you have high battery wear level out of the box, like I did at 6%. I found out how to correct it, so should work for you with this model too. Use your notebook normally on battery down to about 10% from a full charge. Then reboot press F2 or F12, whatever it is to get into the BIOS, and just leave it there till the unit turns off completely on it own. Let it charge to 100% overnight, not turned on.

Next day battery show 0.0% wear level. So perfectly calibrated now and now have full 84 Wh not 79 Wh that I was on with 6% wear level. Use HWinfo to check your battery wear level.

Dont have to do it exactly like I did, but that is how I got my results anyways, so is a sure fire method.

 

How do I check the battery wear percentage that I currently have?

 

It is written in the post I made. HWinfo bro. get it from here, expand the battery tab, click on the battery check the right hand pane. http://www.hwinfo.com/download.php

 

I would love to get you the part number for the cable, but unfortunately I borrowed the Torque screwdrivers to open the case and I've already given them back If I can get hold of it again over the next week I will absolutely post the part number!

So - anyone else having audio echo and 100% failure on hibernate resume? (Win10 x64 Clean Install)

Cheers

M.

 

The cable looks really short. The connector looks like the same standard push on fitting just like HP uses. I would find a broken cheap HP laptop part from about 3 years ago that started using the same connector and SATA/Power connector attach it, and try that out.

http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_odk...cable.TRS0&_nkw=hp+laptop+sata+cable&_sacat=0

 

Hmm.. Sorry man. Not sure why that happened. Win 10 does have native support for Nvme, but maybe it came in an update? Is your windows 10 up to date? Do you have the latest Intel chipset drivers installed? I'm also not using a fresh install of Windows, I'm using the factory image with all drivers from the Dell website installed, and all I did was go into the normal add remove programs menu and remove RST.

 

Yeah it slows down the drive big time using RST. Wasn't me that made the video though, looks like quite a few of us are doing this upgrade. I wonder how much Dell saved going with PM951 over SM951? Bone headed of them. How are you going to release a flagship laptop that can't even match an 8 month old MacBook in ssd speed?

 

Have you noticed any increase in heat around the SSD area underneath the notebook and any reduction of battery life?

 

What's the difference between the PM and the SM?

 

Thanks - I have removed the software for intel RST - can you give a print screen of what you see under device manager - storage controllers? I may be looking for the completely wrong thing.

 

The following info was posted in the Dell XPS 15 with Infinity Display (2015):

 

if you got your laptop from dell, can you please post a screen shot of this registry setting:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Wisp\Touch

I got mine from Microsoft store and my touchpad was a pain to use.
After searching the interwebs, found a guy who posted a solution .... suggesting to change the "Friction" reg key to 5 and the "Bouncing" reg key to 0.

I did that, and the touchpad is behaving much much better.

I am curious to see what settings does dell have when it ships the laptop.

 

The settings on my XPS 15 are:

Bouncing: 0x00000001 (1)
Friction: 0x00000032 (50)

 

thank you.

 

Did anyone find a fix for the CPU being capped after unplugging the laptop?

 

If anyone could spoon feed me where I'm going wrong with changing out the drivers for more speed I could use your help.
What I'm doing that doesn't work is changing out he highlighted driver



What I do is this -


What I end up with on reboot


Edit - I think I figured it out - I went to the bios and changed it to ahci instead of raid although I'm not getting any performance increase.

Once you reboot it you can then install the Samsung nvme drivers - but even after you reboot again I'm still not seeing an significant performance difference.

Turns out the Samsung nvme 1.0 driver is an MS driver from 2006

I just noticed onestephead was posting benchmarks for the 950pro. I'm curious what people saw for benchmarks with their 256gb 951 that came with their xps 15 skylake.

 

fyi - new bios released last night

 

This is what I am getting with my i7/256/FHD set on raid and stock config from Dell. How do these numbers look?

 

Hi,

just wanted to know if anybody has an i5 version of the XPS, and if so: does this processor also suffer from a massive performance decrease if it is unplugged / plugged in again?

What I mean is (this applies to the i7)
- start Notebook on AC power
- unplug power
- run some stresstest (like Prime95 or so) --> i7 reaches 2.6 GHz (no Turbo...)
- plug in again
- run some stresstest (like Prime95 or so) --> i7 reaches 1.7 GHz (WTF...)

Thanks in advance,

Gerhard

 

I have the i5 version of the xps and just ran the tests and can confirm the core gets capped at 1.6ghz after plugging in.

 

Problems I had with the flickering and black screen and music stuttering on youtube when scrolling for me fixed when I did a system restart and didn't download any of the drivers. As someone stated above this is caused by hyper 5, although I cannot confirm that.

Thoughts about my XPS 15 (1080p full hd no touch, core i5, 8gb Ram, 32gb ssd with 1tb hd):

- Trackpad is very good, very smooth and responsive, scrolling works very well and touch is great.
- Keyboard is great, easy to type and good travel with the keys, problem I have is with the backlight going off after about 5 seconds. Haven't found a setting I can change this to yet.
- Screen is amazin even with the 1080p full hd version although some apps on download screens look **** etc.
- Baterry life has been sub par so far but haven't done a proper test so far. Getting around 5-6 hours but with downloads and restarts not surprising.
- System is very quick but like everyone else having problems with the cpu capping after power being plugged in.
- Speakers are very loud and decent quality for notebook speakers.
- Fan is verry quiet and not very noticiable for browsing although haven't done any gaming.

I'm having problems accessing the storage and seeing what's being stored on different drives at the moment. If someone could help me figure out how to access to different drives (if you can) that would be great.

Also trying to delete some of the bloatware and apps that come with the laptop is not possible due to needing permission from installeddrive or some app. Any thoughts?

Thanks

 

Pretty much the same for me.

 

Thanks for testing that. May I ask if you see Turbo clock speeds on Battery in general (3.2 Ghz in your case)?

 

I just replaced my 5 year old motherboard on my PC and imaged the hard drive from my new XPS using the Samsung data migration wizard and it worked like a charm. I can't remember who suggested using the Samsung migration wizard but they are right it is easier than using acronis although slower.

 

Just wondering, the Precision twin of the XPS 15 seems to indicate a 91 wHr battery - while XPS 15 is 84 wHr.

Any reason for this difference?

 

I haven't stressed the cpu enough for it to need to turbo boost up to 3.2Ghz if that's what you're asking.

 

http://configure.us.dell.com/dellst...tation&oc=xctop551015us&s=bsd&fb=1&vw=classic

81Wh only

 

My laptop came with a strange mark, has anybody else got anything like this? It looks like the top of the silicon was removed leaving a fingerprint :/

https://goo.gl/photos/vD5d9HV5mCqsEb4h9

 

I certainly do not have that. Doesn't look right.

 

I made an interesting observation. I noticed that my overall CPU usage has been much higher when I'm running the Edge browser. Even when the webpages in edge are open and just sitting idle, they will each consume some non-trivial amount of CPU, so I end up idling with 20-30% CPU usage which isn't too good for battery.

After the recent Windows 10586 update, I have been using Chrome again since the Chrome scrolling has been greatly improved with the new PTP drivers and I noticed that Chrome is using next to no CPU at all when webpages are idle, 0-5%. Should be interesting to see how this changes my battery life. I was managing a mere 4.5-5 hours just web surfing on Edge, pretty confident I can do better than that now.

 

I'm thinking of replacing my crap battery life yoga 2 pro with the 15 FHD model with the i7 16GB ram and 84wh batt. For you people having the throttle issue with the cpu on unplug/plug what is your power plan in windows set to and does it happen if you set your plan to high performance? Also just for reference if you have anything with hyper v on the pc your screen will flash as this is a current bug so just remove hyper v. the igpu also has issues cause intel is having driver issues not dell. If you upgrade your ssd and want to restore to the new one I suggest making your backup with macrium reflect free as it should be fast and its recovery media uses winpe already. Did any of you get a bezel issue with the FHD and would you say at 80% brightness light usage would net me me over 8-9 hours? Also for the throttling to test if its driver related if you can try turning off DPTF if you find that in your bios.

 

just a quick heads up - for those people ordering the 1TB version, then replacing it with a normal SSD drive (non MSATA) - remember to take out the 32GB SSD in the msata slot that is part of the hybrid setup attached to the 1TB drive in the 2.5" bay. I forgot to do this and that's why it was operating normally but failing to resume from hibernation 100% of the time. Removed the msata 32GB slot and boom - resumes from hibernation successfully now.

Regards

M.

 

So I received on Thursday this gorgeous PC (i7, 16gb, 4K, SSD 512gb).
No problem on mine, it's perfect. However I'm having a weird bug, maybe it is related to Windows 10 Threshold 2 or not, I don't know.
When resuming from sleep, sometimes the keyboard or the touchscreen will be unresponsive. Also (and this always happen), whether it is with Chrome or Edge etc..., I can't seem to load any web page (just keeps refreshing every second), nor can I type an address.
Anyone had this problem ?

 

Can you please tell us if there was a part number on the SATA cable?

 

Looks like Dell suddenly pulled most of their software from the support site for the XPS 15 (9550) See: https://www.dell.com/support/home/us/en/04/product-support/servicetag/CD5F462/drivers?s=DHS

For example, the bluetooth drivers, the color tuning app, and others are suddenly gone. This coincided with the Windows 10 November update and much of the missing software is now available from Windows Update. However, some of the software is not (the display color tuning software), for example is now gone. Any insights?

 

Received my xps 15 last week and used it with the dell bloatware installed and it seemed slightly sluggish and wasn't as fast as I expected. Control panel would take a few seconds to open and loading web pages would take longer than expected.

I decided to re-image it and happy to report it seems a lot faster. Everything responds super quickly and opening control panel is almost instant.

One thing I've only just noticed though is the build quality of the laptop. Around the front edge where the aluminium bottom and the carbon fibre effect join there is a slight misalignment and it running your finger down the side it catches the aluminium slighty. There is also slight light bleed where the trackpad light is on the side where the glue holding the 2 parts together is coming away (not easy to see from pic). The delete key is also stuck down so doesn't press in properly.

 

The fit and finish of the bottom half of this laptop is the only thing really driving me crazy, now that I have figured out many of the software issues. I visited my local MS store to check the display model, and sure enough, it exhibits the same problem.

I wonder if Dell has any plans to refine the design, and if requesting a repair or swap would yield any results. Sort of disappointing that the lid on my unit is flawless, but the base is so poorly fitted, on such a nice computer.

 

I am having a love hate relationship with mine.
Love the form factor, keyboard, matt screen, having 1.5tb of SSD is really handy and the laptop itself is quiet but...

I hate the speakers, the cpu capped at 1.6ghz after battery bug and mine has terrible coil whine

Now do I return it for a refund or try again and hope I do not get the coil whine?

 

This thing is a piece of junk. The display driver keeps crashing, and I'm getting random black screens.

 

Just finished install new Samsung 950 Pro 512GB. I did mine like this:

1. Create a USB recovery drive
2. Remove old SSD and install new SSD
3. Plug in USB recovery drive
4. Press the power button, and will automatically boot to the USB recover drive
5. Choose recover your computer and wait till done, recovery and percentage will be shown.
7. You maybe prompt to clear/reset TPM. I selected F12 which is accept (not sure if this was right, but did it anyway)
8. Windows 10 will install with the usual round circle in center of the screen with the percentage

Couple of things to note:

1. There is a heat/thermal pad strip on the stock SSD, that transfers heat from the SSD to the metal chassis on the bottom of the unit. Not glued on, so just lift it over to the Samsung 950 Pro
2. After restore you will be asked to either accept a change to the TPM, choices are enable or reject. I am not sure which one to choose?

Also to note:

1. Creating a USB recovery drive take forever can be 2-3 hours, so slow.
2. The actual Windows 10 install takes a long time considering it pretty much one of the world fastest PCIe M.2 SSD in the unit, at time of writing this.

After Windows 10 has completed:

1. I had no Intel display driver installed (not sure why). Opened device manager and search online for an update. Or let Dell update download it for you.
2. Enter in the registry key fix that stop the Intel display driver from crashing all the time.
3. Change scaling from 250% to 200% to get a cleaner 1:4 look, that my personal opinion anyway.
4. Uninstall Intel Rapid Storage Technology (RST) software

Intel display driver fix (this works for me). Was posted by eelton on page 2 of this thread

1. Open regedit.exe as admin
2. Browse to and then click the following registry subkey:
   HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\GraphicsDrivers
3. On the Edit menu, click New, and then select the following registry value from the drop-down menu specific to your version of Windows (32 bit, or 64 bit):
   1. Select QWORD (64-bit) value.
   2. Type TdrDelay as the Name and click Enter.
   3. Double-click TdrDelay and add 8 for the Value data and clickOK.
4. Close the registry editor and then restart your computer for the changes to take effect.

Service Manual is here, if you want to find out where to pry open:

https://www.google.co.nz/url?sa=t&r...0uL3Adzi-FB81w&bvm=bv.107467506,d.dGY&cad=rja


I followed this video for the physical install of the drive.

 

Hi guys,

Sorry if I am posting in the wrong place but can anyone share their battery life of xp15 non-touch (1920*1080) with 3 cell (56Whr) and 6 cell (84 Whr) time? If you can list whether its i5 or i7 that would be super!

I am on the fence to buy the i5 config/8gb/1tb vs i7config/8gb/256gbssd and I have a 2.5 inch ssd I would like to use as main.

As well, does anyone have the signature version from microsoft? if so do you guys know what cell config they are selling for the i5/8gb/256gb mode?
http://www.microsoftstore.com/store...-Signature-Edition-Laptop/productID.327149200

 

It looks like this

 

Thanks - I haven't encountered it yet but I only got mine a few days ago.

 

Oh my, I think I am going to hold off on this XPS 15. Seems very troublesome with the QC.