I feel jipped; Dell XPS 13:

Although I love my 2015 Dell laptop, I bought this product thinking I was going to get 9+ hours of battery life, as was marketed/advertised by the company. Battery life is critical for me as I do quite a bit of travel for work.

I understand that with a QHD screen the battery will get drained more quickly, but I am maybe getting 5 hours of battery.

Is there any recourse to be done here or does the consumer just have to accept what in all fairness, was an outright lie by Dell?

 

What are you using it for? Disable unnecessary programmes; your laptop should be idling at 0-1% CPU.

 

The manufacturer's claimed battery time is probably measured with the display at minimum brightness doing a simple task such as browing a document stored locally (ie no WiFi or web browser open). You can use BatteryInfoView to check the power drain when running on battery and thereby improve your understanding of what usage increases / reduces power drain. I've seen my current notebook (Latitude E7450) dip as low as 4W under light usage but if I open up the web browser, make the display a bit brighter, etc, then the power drain will double and the potential battery time will halve.

Notebook manufacturers are too willing to shrink the battery capacity to take advantage of Intel's ability to reduce the power consumption of each new generation of CPU without taking due account of the power saving only happening when the CPU is idle. As a result, a notebook which can still run a whole day of reasonable usage without needing a power socket is still a rare beast. They exist, but won't the the thinnest and lightest.

John

 

I regularly get 10 hours use out of my XPS 13 i5 with FHD. All Macbook Airs can manage more than that. Smaller 12-inch Macbook manages 9hrs+ easily. Not really that rare, you just have to choose wisely.

 

Please share your tips on how to get the most time from the battery. FHD needs less power than QHD (fewer pixels to process) but, in my experience, usage is a key factor.

John

 

I get around 8h on a charge when I use it close to a charger and don't try to save battery, usually having brightness around 50% (i5, FHD), 10-11h when I'm running it at 20% brightness. I think the two important things are a) having a BIOS that fixes the SSD sleep state bug, and b) just having the laptop idle a lot. Search for programs that use the CPU when you don't do anything, in the task manager. For example the MaxxAudio program that came with the laptop constantly used 3-5% CPU, which brought my usage time down to 5-6h.

 

Well ... of course. I live all day inside MS Office apps, which aren't very taxing, otherwise use Firefox rather than Chrome, and other proven power efficient apps whenever I can find them. I'm not playing games or editing video all day. In my office environment I rarely need to go above 50% brightness, usually 20-30%, but actually the backlight is very power efficient even at 100%.

As didsip pointed out, the first thing to do is make sure it can idle properly - and quickly - in the process figuring out what background processes can churn through battery. WiFi 5GHz and Bluetooth on the XPS are very power efficient in my experience. Mine idles at ~2W with radios on, sometimes 1.7W when I'm in a darkened room at low brightness. All those seconds when you're just reading what's on screen can really add up. I like how Dell have configured it to very aggressively seek a low power state (contrast with Microsoft's Skylake devices, which leak power when you just breath on them). I hibernate it rather than sleep whenever I can. I can get through a work day and into the late evening easily. Max CPU can be aggressively limited to e.g. 50% to eek out more use if needed. Undervolting is an option, but I don't need to micoromanage because in my use case the FHD is just fine as it is - an office workhorse.

The biggest impact on battery life was the Dell BIOS update that fixed the SSD not going into low power mode - by a couple of hours.

 

I thought that BIOS update only affected the 2106 Skylake models?

I believe I have the prior year's model...