New XPS 15z

I'm running the OS on an SSD in the main HD bay, with a data drive in the caddy in the optical bay. I did run into some weird issues with the original drive in the optical bay, I think the machine wasn't sure which drive to boot from. Once the original drive was formatted, and there was only one bootable drive in the unit this issue cleared up.

The primary HD bay is SATA3, and the optical drive is SATA2, so you'll want the OS installed to the primary bay, not the optical bay.

 

I'm going to install OS on primary bay the SSD one and already remove OS from my original drive the optical bay. So I hope no issue will come up, may it's happened because of dual BootMGR. And how much space you leave in your SSD.

 

You should be fine then. I think you're right, the machine got confused with two bootable drives. You'd think it would just boot from the first one and take it from there.

I bought a 120GB SSD, which doesn't leave much room for games etc. When prices come down I will buy a bigger one.

 

I was asking about space because there is some amount we suppose to leave.

 

You can use BCDEDIT and delete the bootmgr with /f (force switch) on the old drive. Just make sure you have the right GUID.

 

I started with an empty drive, installed Win 8 and my applications, and took it from there. I don't think there's a set amount that's supposed to be reserved, but with an SSD you may see degraded performance if you don't have enough free space. I would reserve a gig or two of free space. 10% would probably be ideal.

 

Well if you are talking about partitioning for the Intel Rapid Start, I don't think there are Win8 drivers available yet to take advantage of it.

 

Or we can change the Boot priority from BIOS.

 

I actually had an issue with installing Windows 7/8 on my SSD with the original HDD in the Optical Bay. It wouldn't boot until I removed the BootMgr on the HDD.

 

Has anyone run GPU benchmarks (like Furmark)? just curious to know the scores!

Reason is ... running full HD youtube clips (with the Enable hardware acceleration) system is using too much resources and the fan getting kicked on

 

sorry to beat a dead horse, but I'm late to the party. Just got this laptop 2 months ago, and am having the infamous wifi latency issue. It's driving me crazy!

Has there been any fixed? I've searched but there are way too many posts to sort through. Thanks in advance!

 

Update BIOS to A12

Try to update the driver from intel website and again check with DPC latency checker.

 

I guess it should be okay to re-apply A12 now... cos' I was asked by Dell Support to revert from A12 to A10 during that horrible Seagate firmware nightmare.. which they fixed now.

 

Mate my seagate have some bad sector, so I asked for replacement and got WD black Scorpio. We have same machine mean you and me have i5, here most of the people having i7.

 

What software did you use to check the HDD? Mine does some noise, very audible, if I shake it slightly I can hear some kind of locks up, I do not know; it could be a Seagate "feature"?

 

Sorry for late reply: Use Crystal Disk Info or AIDA64 or HWmonitor.

 

If you don't have the good fortune of getting a replacement (like NIGHTMARE), you can try their SEAGATE-Firmware fix

If interested, here are my trials and tribulations from that journey.. Dell XPS 15z -- Hard drive status Issue (after Seagate firmware update) - Laptop General Hardware Forum - Laptop - Dell Community

 

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hinge is a known issue.. if you're still in warranty, they'll replace it
screen stays sturdy for me
heating... its warm under left palm rest but nothing too much

 

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new owner, and I know this subject has been beat to death but I still need to ask this question:

They trackpad sucks, of course. I un-installed the Cyprus and I assume it reverted back to the stock microsoft properties. But where do I edit the settings for the stock properties?

If I go to Control Panel> Hardware> Devices> Mouse it just takes me to the standard wireless mouse settings

stock google image:


That's all mine gives me without a trackpad option. My sensitivity is toooo high and I have to be careful when clicking links, as I always overshoot the links wen dragging to them.


Other than that, anyone recommend doing anything (install or remove or mod) to the 15z? No I will not change the screen and yes I have a warranty on it.

 

Not sure how to control the touchpad sensitivity... but due to the miserable Cyprus issues which Dell are unable to resolve (sigh)
I did the same - uninstalled Cyprus and use the "TouchFreeze" utility which disables touchpad while typing.
Alternatively, to disable the touchpad completely, you can install generic Synaptics touchpad driver which has that option

 

Too late, I got them to send me the proper size notebook. I got the 15z to replace a 14" I had and now they sent me a 14z, much better trackpad wise.

 

When I play a video stream, CPU Usage goes to high numbers (>20) pretty soon and then the fan starts to pick up the speed and hence the noise!!
However, the stream itself has no issue.

Is this a issue with Shockwave Flash (and/or Chrome) and not my Dell XPS 15z?

How is your video streaming performance on Dell XPS 15z?

 

Has anyone had this issue?

Make the laptop go to Sleep via the Start--Sleep, instead of closing the lid. Sometimes, the laptop turns back on immediately, despite not pressing the keypad or the touchpad.

 

Not the exact problem, but similar. After putting my computer to sleep via lid-close or Fn-ESC, my laptop has been waking up in the computer bag, pretty bad news when I open the bag and it's toasty warm in there and my laptop is out of battery.

Is there any way to tell what's waking it up from sleep?

 

It happened a couple of times... but I suspect that was because of some 3rd party process that kicked on and then that resulted in waking up the lappy

@Atook - try this to see what woke it up -- on cmd promt > powercfg -lastwake

 

Awesome! I put it in a bat file on the desktop so I don't forget. Thanks for the tip!

 

All,
I read every post in this thread, took me about 4 or 5 days (read it on my tablet) I just signed up to post my input.

I have only had dell laptops. my last one was a xps m1530. i bought it when they were first sold and it was about a 2000 USD purchase.

about 9 months ago i developed the issue with the nvidia integrated graphics in that the laptop would not boot on power up. didnt bother me that much because i kept the thing on all the time, only rebooting for updates.

well the last 2-3 months it got worse and last week i started looking for a replacement.

i was going to go with a new inspiron but i am a xps fanboy so found a new in box 15z loaded with i7 but with the 1gb card from frys for 750 bux.

what a difference!!! ive not had any issues that has been described in this thread. none!!

when i got it home, i promptly removed the HDD and the DVD and installed TWO Samsung 840 PRO SSDs--one as main and one in the dvd slot, and i downloaded windows 8 directly from the windows . burned an iso file off another computer (no dvd drive remember) and installed the 3.0 gb file with a thumb drive.

loaded all the drivers off the dell site on the win 8 tab for this model. i went to intel to get the updated wireless card driver.

no screen door, no stripped trim, no heat issues. samsung magician software has optmized the OS. This machine boots up from an off state to the pin login screen in 4-5 seconds.

i am blown away how fast the ssd drives are. i remember when they were just announced. they were very expensive. ooh both samsung 840 pro drives are 128gb.

i think the laptop is nice physically and internally its laid out clean and professional. early on in this thread there were a lot of haters on this machine.

i have added 11gb of unused partitions on both drives to help with the health and stability. again the magician software worked just awesome.

i purchased a cheap caddy off amazon. it was 9 buxs or something like that. used prime shipping to get it so it was waiting when i picked up the laptop. so please dont spend 50 bux or so on caddys. its not needed.

anyway, nice thread. ive lurked on this forum for years and the information here has been helpful in that time. consider me a happy user of the 15z.

no buyers remorse, no heating issues (i dont game) no wifi issues.

S-C

 

@Stromberg-Carlso - good to hear that
question.. how hard/easy was that HDD install in the DVD slot?

2 issues I still have are the audio cracking on video streams and cursor jumping on typing...

 

Spoiler

I don't know how this happened.

 

I've got 16GB in mine. Works great.

 

This have tendency to lose the color and de-attached from his location. Call the dell executive.

 

Very easy just buy the caddy. I'm using it no issue.

 

How easy / hard is it to install the caddy? ..also how much is it?
if its not too hard, I'm thinking of having a couple of them -- BRay and HDD

 

Just open your laptop and remove all screw of DVD ROM and put the caddy in that place. I'm also going buy USB External Enclosure Caddy for DVD-ROM

2nd HDD SSD Hard Drive Caddy for Dell XPS 14z 15z Alienware M14x Studio 1569 | eBay

 

I had an engineer and replaced the fan, the motherboard too (refurbished), but did not need, was working fine, only the fan was the problem. Looks like the video chip freshly reballed.
Now, the laptop is very, very quiet. I was nearly to buy the fan myself from eBay avoiding any unpleasant surprise of the engineers, breaking the laptop, but €40 was too expensive.
So, I decided to go ahead to use the 6 month left of warranty.
I do not know who trained the engineers, while screwing down the screws was putting too much pressure that nearly moving the table, I have no words.....
I have to repast myself, the way he did is the same a bird pooped....

 

@NIGHTMARE .. thanks! will check it out

@codred2 -- haha.. well the one that worked on mine literally learned on the job

Last few times I checked this thread, its relatively silent... is it becos your system is stable now or that you just moved on?
Mine seems mostly stable.. only issue that still persists is the losing focus while typing (& the metal frame thingy coming while when I travel with it)

 

Accidentally, water went inside my laptop. i called dell and the engineer came as it was still under warranty and he said the accidental damage was not covered under my warranty and went off. I called dell again today they said the motherboard was gone and it has to be replaced and if any other parts are damaged other than MOBO those ll be replaced at a free of cost if i pay £700

and they gave me a 15% discount. Now i have to pay £600

what should i do now..

 

Ask any of friend who have same laptop under accidental warranty.

 

You should not have mentioned about water stuff, just the laptop is not working anymore, wipe off the water and that's it.
The engineers are so LOW trained/skilled that would not see it.
On my XPS 15z three motherboards have been replaced, the last one is working really good.
My previous post regarding that motherboard that has been reballed, failed after a few days (no water damage, in spite of having a cup of coffee near most of the time), the same problem, fan run at max speed without a reason. I have less than two month left of warranty and I WILL call them to replace the palm rest and the base cover. The palm rest, the surrounding shiny trim is peeling off and the base cover the left side of it there two screws, the engineers broke them, the plastic holes….
Third motherboard and the third fan, both are working fine. I put the XPS 15 L521x in a drawer, I cannot use it, just came from Anovo.uk depot in horrible conditions....long story..
15Z works better for me.
Back to you problem, I understand that it is fine to report any fault caused by user, accidental damage in your case, do not lie, good will, good faith, but there is always a cost of both sides, everyone is free to choose the best one.
Telling the truth = £600, not telling the truth = 0 cost. Based on over ten Dell engineers I came across, none of them would have noticed the water damage.

 

In my case i didn't mention it was water damage just told them the lappy was not switching ON. when the engineer opened it he noticed there are some water droplets in the motherboard. even i dried it for 3 days before calling dell..but my bad luck there was still some liquid inside.

 

Who cares about 1920x1080? I have l502x with this resolution and there's nothing great about it. Of course, I have only understood it once I have tried it. A Dell and some other companies are the kind of companies who don't care about how good something is, they only care about how good the idea of it will sell. So they will sell you something that only sounds good, but when you actually try it, it will turn out to be a waste of money, and you're going to have some more of the bad decisions along with that. I can't say that Apple doesn't do it for sure, but I think I understand why Apple doesn't care about putting 1920x1080 into their MBPs. It's not the most important thing. l502x has 1920x1080, BUT nobody cares to mention, that there's no black color and the lowest brightness is too bright. What's the point of big resolution if your eyes hurt if you look at this display and they hurt because of having to distinguish between reflections on the screen and what the screen is actually showing? There's no point. Same thing with wide gamut displays, which are nonsense when windows still does not support wide gamut displays on a good enough level. It seems to me that Apple cares a LOT more about the final package, and everything working together to give a good experience, rather than about things that sound good on paper but don't create a good experience.

 

A lot of people care about 1920x1080. More desktop real estate. MBP's now have Retina displays packing 2880-by-1800 or 2560-by-1600, so they don't care about 1920x1080 because they have higher.

 

More desktop real estate doesn't mean anything if it's too small to read comfortably. People who want more real estate buy a monitor. The only form factor that makes it OK to have large DPI is Air. Retina is more than just more pixels crammed into a square millimeter, Retina isn't designed to just make everything seem small on the screen, it's designed to make everything a lot more detailed, which 1920x1080 on a 15.6 screen doesn't accomplish. At best it's going to force you to enlarge the damn fonts via Windows options (which I don't personally do), which doesn't accomplish much at all. Again, I think it's the reason why Apple didn't "invent" a useless cramming of 1920x1080 into every 15" MBPs and instead came up with Retina.

 

I advise people who are perfectionists to not buy this thing, as an owner of l502x. For me, I dont need to be an owner of the new one to know that Dell doesn't deserve my trust anymore. If they made something bad once, they'll do it again. Some people may be happy with l502x, but there are also people who are happy with many things, it doesn't mean that those are good products. I'm a perfectionist, and I'm sorry, but for one single decision to put a wide gamut display into a computer with an OS that doesn't support color management, this decision to me means that Dell don't know what the hell they're doing and they don't care. By the way, Windows 8 doesn't support color management still, it means that even if you load a color profile, only a few programs that support color management will be using that profile and NOT the windows itself. There's no way anybody could seriously say that a company that sells something like this should be trusted. It's unacceptable. If you want a Macbook and you're considering this Dell notebook, I say think very hard about what I just wrote. Most likely, if you want Apple, you probably value quality and you know when you see it. I have doubts that Dell see things the way you do, because from my experience they clearly don't.

 

My battery is slowing down I guess... I get around hour and 1/2 now.
How long do you get out of your battery now?

Have any of you replaced the battery?
Is this proprietary Dell battery? Or is it available elsewhere? for cheaper ofc

 

Upto 4 hours depending on the power plan

Did the wifi latency issue ever get fixed?

 

Here is the same with brightness set to 6 lines on power saver settings, I get over 4 to 5 hours.
Balance plan half brightness, around 4-4.30 hours....depends what I am doing.
Impressed with the battery so far, it is a year now and only 4% wear.
The only problem I am having is the keyboard is not flat with the palm rest, when close the lid puts pressure on LCD.
I have a few more days left of warranty, I might call them to replace the palm rest....

 

The screen on my 15z (1920x1080) is damaged so I'm planning on buying a replacement panel from laptopscreen.com. I'm just curious if there is a drop-in replacement that is of higher quality than the factory one, or if I should just go with what is listed on the website as the proper replacement.