XPS 12 Owners Lounge

@TreInJapan
As I've already stated before, the black screen after sleep wasn't completely fixed for my machine with A02. I will now try to disable Intel Rapid Start and see if this can fix the problem.
I never had problems with the responsiveness of the touchscreen yet.
Go ahead and check your power management settings of the Intel 7260 wireless card in the device manager. The box "Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power" has to be unchecked.

//edit: I disabled Intel Rapid Start yesterday and experienced a black screen after resume today. I also noticed that my notebook seems to be unable to save the password for the hotspot of my Galaxy S3. >.<

 

I fixed my issue with the battery. I had to run the battery down until the laptop shut off completely and that seems to have recalibrated it so that it stays at 100% when it is fully charged.

 

Pulled the trigger on mine on 8/16, have a ship date of 8/30. I've been an XPS owner since Gen 1 and I cannot believe how much longer production times run as the number of selectable hardware options dwindle. The one thing I like about the XPS line is the long life I get out of them; my Gen 1 lasted almost 5 years and my Studio XPS 16 is about 4.5 years old now. I'm looking forward to something a lot lighter, easier to carry around on the motorcycle, last at the local coffee shop without a power cord, and still handle all my programming tasks.

My poor Studio XPS 16 has a "hole" worn through the touch pad and space bar, but it still keeps trucking. It originally came with Vista, but I put Win 7 on it and now it's running Win 8. I have an iPad mini that I use for maybe an hour each day off and on, so I'm hoping that the new XPS 12 replaces both!

 

Production times haven't changed. When you get your machine, you'll see from the installation dates that it was ready weeks before. It just spends a bunch of time on a boat from China (or wherever it's manufactured) and then doesn't count as "shipped" until it hits the receiving center in southern California.

I finally got my upgraded machine yesterday after sending back the base model. Still unimpressed with the track pad -- will need to try one of the scrolling programs to see if it can do better. It came with broken wi-fi out of the box, but upgrading to the latest driver seems to have mostly fixed that. For most of the day the wi-fi was fine, but then it did funny things for a few minutes in the evening. When I tried to make a recovery backup the process hung at 90% and when I canceled it the usb stick had a write-protect on it that I can't seem to remove even through reg edits; however, issues with recovery backups are a W8 problem, and probably not related to the laptop. Other than that, everything is fine so far. It's a beautiful machine, and I've decided that with its looks and brilliant screen I can commit to it and live with anything else that isn't quite right.

Can anyone recommend good games for it? Currently I only have Street Fighter X Mega Man, which doesn't exactly strain the processors. I think I'll get Final Fantasy VII and Burnout Paradise (current humble bundle has the latter cheap), but can anyone recommend something more recent that runs well?

 

I have noticed the wifi issues since the updates, even with the latest wifi driver.

 

I saw a video of a guy talking about the wifi issues on youtube. His solution was to turn off bluetooth. Maybe that helps in your cases...

 

I get 5.5 hours with power save mode on the lowest brightness without the dynamic brightness setting enabled, if I'm reading a lot on the web or watching local videos(from the drive). Though, Balanced or Dell gets similar in those scenarios. Power Saving mode is really advantageous if you are doing something more than light usage.

The issue with the Ivy Bridge version is no matter how low you put your power settings, you won't ever get more than 5.5 hours, that's the hard limit. With Haswell you'll see greater variance depending on the brightness settings since the other parts of the system uses much lower power. With 25% brightness aiyaaabatt can probably get 9-10 hours.

 

Yep, that is correct. With 25% brightness ,wifi off, and just word processing, I am seeing 10-11 hours battery life. With wifi on, and light web browsing in chrome, I am seeing around 8-9 hours of battery life. For medium usage at 50% brightness, I am seeing a consistent 7-7.5 hour battery life. Haswell does indeed add great benefits to mobile computing.

 

So, playing with my new machine more, I finally stuck in some headphones. WOW. The hiss is terrible, and borders on making headphones flat-out unusable. I've never heard nearly that level of hiss out of a headphone jack before. It's been mentioned before in this thread, but there wasn't much discussion about it. Is the hiss really supposed to be this bad? There's also a minor (but permanent) crackle out of the left channel. Do the rest of you all have this?

The volume of the headphones also seems unreasonably high, to the extent that the very lowest volume setting in iTunes still requires me to turn the actual laptop volume down to 10% for comfortable listening. I've played with the sound settings and it's always like this.

I feel like if you all had this, we'd be talking about it. Is it just mine?

(Also, how do I get it to stop telling me every time I plug or unplug the headphone jack?)

 

I experienced all of those exact issues until I did a clean install of windows 8 and got rid of all the Dell crapware. Now they are all gone and the sound works great. I think it has to do with the Dell audio software drivers that control the headphones and stuff. Just use windows drivers and it should work great!

edit - sorry, after closer reading, I did not experience any crackle in either of the speakers (or headphones) that you mentioned.

 

This is what I wanted to hear -- thanks. So, it's a software problem and not a defective audio jack or something similar. Well, the crackling might be an issue, but it's really difficult to evaluate that apart from the other problems. If it's still there after I solve the rest, then I'll worry.

I don't really want to do a clean install, although I suppose Dell will give me the media if I pester them. Did the clean install put everything the way it should be, or did you then have to do to Dell's website and download a bunch of drivers? Anyone know if W8 will find the right replacement audio drivers on its own if I remove the Dell ones? Simply disabling the "MaxxAudio Pro" in the menu doesn't solve anything.

*edit* Even though Realtek isn't mentioned anywhere in the "Dell Audio" popup, I guess Dell Audio is coming through the Realtek sound drivers? I can't find Dell Audio on its own anywhere else. What ARE the "standard" Windows 8 sound drivers, and how do I get them?

 

You have two options. Find the Dell Audio software that is messing everything up and uninstall it (I couldn't find it when I was briefly looking).

OR, You can do a full clean install of windows 8 to make sure there is nothing of DELL on your laptop except for the drivers you want installed (this is a more advanced method so if you have never done this before or are not good with computers, you may not want to try this. But this also gives you the option to free up space on your SSD. I was able to have a total of 100GB free for use after I did a clean install of windows 8. Contrasted with the 68gb free space that was available out of the box. Well, technically you can free up a similar amount of space without doing a clean install... by using a disk partition manager)

IF you do a clean install, you have to do a clean install without Dell's media (unless they give you Windows 8 media that they have not modified with their software additions), which means that you will need to find an ISO. of Windows 8 to reinstall the operating system, or you will need to find a DVD copy of windows 8 upgrade or something.

Here is a guide I found after quick google search. Might want to give it a read:
How To Clean Install Windows 8 (Part 1 of 2)


Edit - forgot to answer. The default windows 8 sound drivers are already pre-packaged into windows 8 operating system. Meaning, if you can find and uninstall Dell's audio software, then Windows 8 default sound drivers should come into effect automatically.

 

Thanks for all that. I've done clean installs before, but not with W8. In point of fact, I think if the first thing I did after a clean install was to download "My Dell," that would probably give me an easy avenue to installing everything else I want.

I've looked, and I can't find any hint of "Dell Audio" as a separate app, driver, or program. I gotta assume that it's built into the Realtek drivers. I might try uninstalling them and seeing if W8 is smart enough to fall back on native drivers.

Oh Dell, why can't you make a machine that just works? The average user would be lost trying to figure out all these stupid little things. This is why people buy MacBooks and iPads -- they take it home, they turn it on, and it runs properly. The amount of customization it's taking me to get everything to work smoothly is just silly.

*edit*

Confirmed, the Realtek driver is the culprit, and the sound works just fine with it uninstalled. There is a more recent driver on Dell's website, but it didn't fix the problem so I uninstalled that, too. Without Realtek installed, the hiss and crackling is completely gone. Headphones are still rather too loud, but that's a common problem when switching from speakers to earbuds on the same volume setting. If anyone has a solution for that, though, I'm all ears.

(On an unrelated note, I've now also installed Two Finger Scrolling, which meaningfully improves the scrolling on the trackpad. I've also set the wifi not to sleep, which so far has prevented any further wifi drops. I might finally have the basic functionality ironed out.)

 

Glad to hear it solved the sound issues. If you haven't updated your wifi drivers yet, do so on Dell's driver page. I was getting disconnects until I updated the wifi drivers and its been flawless since. Also, make sure to update BIOS to A02. It will fix several serious issues related to coming out of "sleep"

 

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Oh, I wasn't disagreeing with any of that. My point was just that it's not production time at all -- the laptop is still built just as quickly as it always was. Dell is simply hiding ten days of shipping time under "in production."

Note also that it isn't this way for most of Dell's products; plenty of laptops are available in a few days. I think the problem here is just that Dell hasn't yet stockpiled enough of the machine in North America to sell and ship from its stockpiles. As a result, new orders can't go out until the next batch arrives from overseas. I doubt Dell was ever airlifting their laptops -- that's an avoidable expense, and serves no purpose in this when they're clearly selling all that they can make regardless (or there would be a stockpile and this wouldn't be an issue).

Mine was actually delayed by an additional week on one day's notice, which peeved me to no end and speaks to poorly-monitored stock levels at Dell. Fortunately, Dell hands out rebates like candy, and getting the laptop for a little cheaper was worth the delay to me.

*edit*

I already updated both. My wifi was actually critically broken before the updated driver -- I had to download it on another machine and put it on a usb stick. I turned of Rapid Start, so no sleep issues anyway; I'd rather have 8GB of hard drive than an improved hibernate.

 

Can someone elaborate on how to uninstall the realtek drivers/which ones to uninstall in order to get rid of the hissing?

EDIT: can confirm that uninstalling Realtek's drivers gets rid of the hissing that occurs when you use some headphones. They've released an update a few days ago, but I haven't gotten around to trying it.

EDIT2: installed the new Realtek driver, the hissing returned.

What's worth noting is that the Realtek drivers seem to give better sound quality than the default W8 drivers, unfortunately. Unless I'm missing something, it seems like I have to choose between HD audio and not-having any static.

 

Can anyone comment on the max resolution I can obtain on an external monitor by using a displayport-&gt;dvi adapter on this machine? Hdmi seems capped to 1080p

 

I've only had my XPS 12 for a few days, so I can't comment on battery life yet. Regarding the trackpad, there are issues when trying to two-finger scrolling in web pages, the screen jumps up as you're trying to scroll down. No problems with the wifi. I am having a serious screen flashing/flickering issue which I will post about shortly.

That said, have you seen the Sony Vaio Duo 13 in person? I have, and it has only one screen angle when viewing in laptop mode. That was a total deal killer for me.

 

Got my Haswell XPS 12 a few days ago. I've updated all drivers and Windows is up to date as well. I have a pretty bad screen flashing/flickering issue: Dell XPS 12 Haswell screen flashing & flickering problem - YouTube

This happens pretty frequently and is usually resolved temporarily by closing and opening the lid.

Has anyone else had this problem? Does it look like a hardware issue?

 

The trackpad and wifi chip are now completely different hardware. The new trackpad is still not amazing, and the new wifi chip still causes problems for some people, but on the whole all the problems from the Ivy Bridge version are fixed.

Battery life is much improved. The old machine struggled to hit five hours, while the new one casually hits seven to eight. It could probably reach ten with everything turned down.

That's not normal. Call Dell. They'll send a guy to replace the screen.

 

I had something very similar where a large area at the bottom of the screen went black for half a second. I noticed that it would not happen while I was moving the mouse but when I stopped moving the mouse it would start again. Dell UK could not determine if it was the screen or the motherboard so decided to replace the whole computer. It has not happened on the replacement so it was definitely hardware related.

 

Thanks, sounds like the same thing that's happening to mine. If the whole computer gets replaced, I wonder what the chances are that they'll let me swap the hard drives so that I won't have to reinstall everything? I've already removed the restore and hibernate partitions and upgraded to Windows 8 Pro.

 

At the time they replaced it, I hadn't yet deleted any partitions. I had split the main partition on my 512Gb SSD but I just made full backups of each of my partitions (not the system ones) and then restored them onto the new machine.

 

Quick battery report for you guys. Flew from LA to Tokyo yesterday and the XPS 12 got me through almost 7 episodes of Top Gear, which is close to 7 hours
Had the brightness on lowest (which is not very low at all actually!) and the max CPU state at 30%, as well as airplane mode on, etc.

 

Has anyone had any luck creating a Windows 8 Recovery Drive? (Search->Settings->Create a recovery drive)
I get the following error when attempting this:

"We can't create a recovery drive on this PC. Some required files are missing. To troubleshoot problems when your PC can't start, use your Windows installation disc or media"

Note that I've successfully create a Dell factory restore recovery drive. But I want a Windows 8 recovery drive so that if I need to, I can restore a system image that I've created. It appears that the Dell factory restore drive will only restore back to the factory state. I don't see that I can use it to restore a system image.

 

Just got mine (i7, 256GB) two days ahead of schedule. I was a little worried that going from 1080p on a 16" display to a 12.5" display was going to be pushing the limits of my eyesight, but I am really loving this crystal clear display! I was also worried about not having "real" buttons on the trackpad, but I'm learning the new functions available to me with it; have not run into any problems with the new trackpad yet.

This is easily the most solid laptop from the way it feels in my hands than any other I've ever owned.

 

You're talking about doing the same thing twice. The Dell recovery drive tool is just a different UI for the Windows recovery drive tool. Both just create a factory restore. If you already did it once, and if you took the option to kill the recovery partition on your hard drive afterwards, then the recovery info isn't there any more and so you can't make another recovery drive with it.

It sounds like you just want a regular old backup. That's a different process.

Yeah, it's as much as a pound heavier than some of its competition, but the thing is a tank.

 

One month into having mine now and I cannot rate it high enough.

At home I've got it hooked up to a Targus USB3 + power dock, and also a Dell U3012 monitor - and this thing has not hiccuped once.

I can quite easily achieve 6-8 hours of moderate use out of it too. Love it more than any other (Dell or other) laptop i've ever had.

 

Got all my files transferred over from the old machine. While running Visual Studio 2012, Outlook, OneNote and Word, I fired up WOW just to see if it was playable. At full 1080p and medium settings, was getting 38-40 fps. Could probably hit a higher fps if I set the clipping lower, but if it's over 30, I'm pretty happy. Might have to hit IronForge for a better test

I'm only an occasional gamer, so I think this little machine is more than enough for my gaming needs.

Can't wait to work from the coffee shop tomorrow without worrying about being tethered to power!

 

Just had Dell out to replace my Intel 6235 with the Killer 1202 in my old XPS 12, wifi now seems to work as expected

Shame the battery life on the old model isn't particularly good, but otherwise a great machine.

 

I am having a weird problem with my XPS 12. My computer keeps running out of memory, and memory usage shows 99% but there are no active programs using the allocated memory.

I have isolated the problem to the synaptics touchpad driver from Dell. When I uninstall it, the memory usage goes back to normal as it should. But with the synaptics touchpad driver installed the nonpaged memory keeps increasing until my laptop runs out of physical ram.

Has anyone else who use their XPS 12 for long periods of time without rebooting notice an increased / high level of memory usage?

 

36 hours uptime, 67% of 8GB used with:
4 open Word Docs
1 open Excel file
Outlook with monster data file
11 IE browser windows

Closed everything to get back down to 46% used

Rebooted, opened one IE browser window and holding at 19%

I'll leave the system like this for a couple of hours and through a few sleep and wake cycles without starting anymore apps and see what mem use does.

 

To those that upgraded from Ive Bridge...

I just got the XPS 12 from Best Buy, which has the i5/4Gb/128Gb SSD for $899 plus $50 bb gift card. While battery life is not the greatest, it's not a deal breaker for me. My understanding is that the Haswell model has a different touchpad. Is it any better than the crap that comes with the Ive Bridge model? I love everything about the XPS 12 except the touchpad - it is total crap...

Polbit

 

Yes, it's better. It's not perfect, but it's much improved.

 

Thanks for replying. The problem happens when you use the touchpad, the non paged memory keeps growing (see the screenshot). If you leave the system idle, it will not grow at all. Also you may notice that your non paged value in the Task Manager will be unusually high.

In Poolmon you will see that the Synaptic driver is leaking and adds to the nonpage memory, eventually to the point where you reach 99% memory usage and your system starts to use virtual ram and slows down. A reboot fixes this, but again happens again.

 

So for people that have been using the XPS12 for a few weeks/months, what's the verdict on this Ultrabook as a convertible?
Is the tablet mode useful/used? Or are you only using it as a touch notebook?

 

I have had my Ivy Bridge model since January (I-5, 256) and I use the tablet feature on a regular basis. It is my preferred method for playing Civ 5, with over 300 hours logged. I also like to do light browsing on the web that way.

 

So finally I managed to return my i5/4GB/128 and get it replaced with an i7/8GB/256. The new machine feels slightly smoother in casual use but that might just be because I am using Balanced power mode in this new machine whereas I used Power Saver in my old machine.

I don't think the tablet mode will get much use from me. The most useful it has been is when I could turn it 90 degrees and get a taller viewing area.

 

I don't use it as a tablet much, but I use " kiosk" mode with the screen facing backwards all the time. If I'm playing a touch game or watching movies (or just doing casual internet browsing) and I don't need the keyboard, I turn the laptop around to get the keys out the the way,

Anyone who won't ever flip the screen should just wait for a touch-enabled XPS 13. It's almost certainly coming soon, and it'll be lighter with a bigger screen.

My only concern at this point is the overactive fan (comes on too easily, I think) and the sometimes-laggy trackpad (a driver issue, I'm sure, perhaps related to the memory leak mentioned above). Other than that, this laptop is great.

 

I wouldn't count on the XPS 13 (with Haswell) coming this year. As I recall, the thing only got a HD refresh at the beginning of the year, and it took a year for them to simply stick a Haswell processor in their existing XPS 12 with only minor hardware modifications (as opposed to the touchscreen they'll have to add to the XPS 13).

 

So i have enroute a 2012 version of the XPS 12 from dell. I would like to know what updates and / or fixes I should perform out of the box. I see a lot of different issues, and would love the experience of the forum to help me. Thanks in advance for all of your help.

 

I've encountered my first issue with the Haswell version. Over the last few days, I've encountered a brief blue screen that says something like "Windows has encountered an error and will restart." This screen is on for just a few seconds, then goes black like the computer is rebooting. Then I get this:

internal hard disk drive not found
to resolve this issue. try to reseat the drive.
No bootable devices--strike F1 to retry boot, F2 to enter Setup Menu, F5 to enter PSA

I've tried F1 and F2, only to get the same message. If I turn the machine off, wait a few seconds and then turn it back on, Windows boots up fine. I don't see any clues in the event logs. This seems to happen about 5 minutes after waking the machine up from sleep. Has anyone else encountered this?

 

See page 141 of this thread for a good summary:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/dell-xps-studio-xps/693432-xps-12-owners-lounge-141.html

 

New Haswell XPS 12 touch screen goes inactive after sleep.
I updated all drivers from the my dell site when I received the XPS 12. So I don't know if it worked before I updated it. I don't appear to have a problem with WIFI not connecting after sleep, but my touch screen will not operate until I cycle power.

 

Hi everyone. I'm new to the forums and to the XPS 12. I just received my 2013 version with Haswell i7, 8GB RAM, and 256GB SSD. So far, I am loving it. I do have one issue, when in notebook mode, when I rotate the screen, the desktop does not auto-rotate. It does not matter if I am in Metro or standard desktop. Rotation works fine when it is in tablet mode.

I have verified that all drivers are up-to-date, and I have A02 BIOS.

any ideas?

 

^Why are you rotating the screen in notebook mode? I think the accelerometers only kick in when you're in tablet mode anyway.

If you really wanted to rotate the screen in notebook mode, you could just try ctrl+alt+left/down/right (and then ctrl+alt+up to put it back to normal).

 

Thanks, it should be here tomorrow. Im excited

 

After a lengthy diag session with Dell support, they determined that the motherboard needs to be replaced. I did notice, however, that the system only seems to lose contact with the SSD when I am running multiple Office applications. I was disappointed that Dell shipped the machine with the 32-bit version of Office, so I might experiment with removing that and putting the 64-bit version while I'm waiting for the new MB.

 

What I mean is flip the screen without folding all the way back into tablet mode, such as when I want to show someone my screen sitting across from me. It actually started working again. Not sure what changed, other than bringing it home from work! I hope there is not flaky hardware??