Not overly impressed with xps 15 9550

I have had it a week now. I bought it from the microsoft store, the high end one with i7, 16gb and 512gb.

Don't get me wrong. It's a very nice laptop, and it's fast. But for $2000, I guess I expected much more.

My complaints:

1) Battery life is horrible. And I did update the bios to last week's release. After using it for an hour or so, 40-50%, usually more, is gone. I held off buying a computer for Skylake, which I thought was more efficient. As it is, my old core2 laptop with discrete gpu got just as much life with a battery half the size. I understand it's partly due to the 4k display, which sucks because...

2) The 4K display is unusable to me. Windows is hopelessly unable to scale to high dpi displays, programs that weren't explicitly written for high dpi. AutoCAD, Quattro Pro, Photoshop; toolbars and much of the text is so tiny it's practically invisible. Other text is so comically large, not even half of it fits in the space allotted. As a result I run it at 1920x1080, which looks horrible next to the native 1600x900 on my old laptop. And I don't understand the scaling problems, because if I change to full resolution from 1920x1080, almost everything is scaled fine (the exception being huge tool tip text). Until I reboot. Then all the elements go back to being tiny or huge.

3) The DW1830 bluetooth does not like my Logitech MX Anywhere 2 mouse. I checked with three other computers, and it worked beautifully over bluetooth on those. In addition, wifi performance seemed spotty and laggy. So I bought the Intel 8260 card and swapped it in. Wifi is better. The mouse worked better, but still not as smooth as on my son's alienware 13 or my daughter's Inspiron 14. However, half the time I turn on the computer, bluetooth is not working, showing "this device has been stopped" in device manager. I have to reinstall the drivers to fix it. Works for another few times coming out of sleep, then repeats. Speaking of sleep...

4) While it comes out of sleep mode very quickly, coming out of hibernation can sometimes take 15-20 seconds. A few times, more than 30 seconds. This is a big deal as the laptop has to go into hibernation due to battery drain in normal sleep mode. The alternative is to leave it plugged in when not in use. Which I imagine over time will decrease the life of the battery.

5) About half the time when I reboot, it seems to hang on the "Restarting" screen. I let it go about 5 minutes once, before I gave up and held down the power button.

6) The screen/lid is a pain to open. There is no indentation in which to put your finger to get a grip on either the lid or the base. And being so stiff, it's not easy to get a grip on the edges. Unless I am missing something, this is a huge design flaw.

7) Not the computer's fault, but Windows 10 still feels very beta to me. It was clear to me when it was first released, that they rushed the RTM out the door. But over 6 months later, it's not much better. Even Windows 8 feels more polished (if you avoid the modern ui settings, which is mostly possible in 8, but not 10)

I am seriously considering returning this computer, which I hate to do, because I already bought a surface pro 4 from microsoftstore.com and returned (it had all the same problems and more). It's a shame, because on those occasions when none of the above issues are present, this computer is lovely and wonderful to use.

 

Sorry to hear you had so many problems.

If it helps, the 1080p version is far superior in terms of both battery life and DPI scaling. And it is a much friendlier resolution to run games at native 1080p resolution than native 4k resolution.

If you don't game at all, then I think you bought the wrong laptop. If you are just looking for a rock solid laptop for non-gaming purposes, check out the XPS 13 1080p version.

Sent from my XT1575 using Tapatalk

 

Yep, I returned my 4k display version for the FHD version. With the 84kwh battery, its fantastic.

4k on a small screen just doesnt make sense

 

I only bought 4k because of the bigger battery. After using it for some time, I really appreciate it and can't go back to fhd. It is just like I can't use lower res smartphone again.

The increased ppi and color saturation makes big sense for reading text and pictures on mobile work space imho

 

Hi! I have made a few comments in bold above. I guess it all boils down to how and what you use this computer for. For my purposes consisting of looking at my 4K videos and doing some preliminary grading "in the field" so to speak - it fits the bill very nicely.especially in such a compact package. The display calibration and color fidelity, the very fast system drive (PCIe and NVMe) and the fast internal SSD (2nd drive) with read/write of 500 comparable to the speed of my RAID 0 array on the desktop, the excellent graphics card (my video color grading software is not supposed to work on a 2GB card but I'm getting realtime color-graded 4K video playback on this system) - these all add up to "dream machine" for my purposes.

 

Even though I bought the signature edition, I am going to do a clean install of 10 and see if it solves my problems. I think I cured some of the problems with tweaking. I downgraded the nvidia drivers to the dell supplied version (instead of the downloaded nvidia version). I disabled bluetooth collaboration and the mouse works a little better, but its still jumpy when downloading large files (steady wifi activity vs the sporadic wifi activity when simply browsing?) I am going to try using manifest files for programs I mentioned that don't like 4k. We will see.

 

I wiped the hard drive and did a clean install of windows 10, using the most updated install files from the Microsoft windows 10 upgrade tool. I used drivers from support.dell.com. With the exceptions of using the F6 raid driver and Intel HD530 display driver from downloadcenter.intel.com.

Knock on wood, so far in the last few days, I have had no stability problems. All reboots have been trouble free. No hanging on the bios screen or windows restarting screen. I have had no bluescreens, and no display driver crash/recovery messages. Booting up from hibernation is much faster now, less than 10 seconds. Not sure what was up with the factory install, but between this and the surface pro 4, I have pretty much lost all faith in Microsoft's "signature series" pledge.

Battery life seems much better now. I haven't had much chance to test it out yet, but the battery icon is showing 96% with 6-7 hours remaining. Before I want to say it was showing 3-4 hours remaining around 90%, and quickly went down 50-60% with a little over an hour remaining.

The bluetooth also works much better, with one caveat: as long as I am on 5ghz wifi. If I am connected to 2.4 ghz, the mouse gets all jumpy again while wifi is active. (of note: I noticed this same problem when I had a macbook pro and macbook air running in bootcamp). Guess I will just stick to using the nano receiver and tying up a usb port.

I spent some time researching the high dpi scaling problem. I am now running at full resolution, and I am using external manifest files for AutoCAD and Corel office (I forgot I upgraded to the latest photoshop recently which now supports scaling). It's not elegant, they are blurry, but since I don't use them much on my laptop, I can live with it.

I also installed the Dell Feature Enhancement Pack (from another Dell computer's support page). It added a Dell Keyboard Control Panel applet that allows you to set the keyboard backlight timeout to 5 minutes. I did this before reinstalling windows and noticed this setting must be at the hardware level, because even without having to reinstall the FEP, it is still at 5 minutes.

So I am satisfied now. But I have to wonder what folks who are not computer savvy (and don't have a friend or relative who is) do when they buy this laptop and run into these issues.

 

About your last sentence: they don't buy this laptop. They buy a MacBook instead

I think this is hardware-wise a truly beautiful piece of mastership but software-wise you need to be a power user to get the most out of it.

 

Glad to see you are "back on track" with the computer - but you are right about the necessity of doing upgrades and not using it just "Out of the box". I also found the FEP because I wanted to extend keyboard lighting time but was a bit hesitant since it didn't mention Windows 10 support but everything else seems to work fine since I installed it.

 

Did you also try AHCI mode + reboot?

 

2) Never run an LCD at less that it's native resolution, it will always look like crap. Set it to native and then set the DPI scaling. I've got my DPI Scaling set to 200%.

Your battery life does seem pretty low. I'm getting 5-6 hours on standard desktop tasks and I have the exact same spec system, purchased from Microsoft.

 

Thanks for sharing this, I'm about to do a fresh installation and it's great to know that the 5-min setting will stick at the hardware level without a reinstall of FEP!
-JT