XPS 15 (Haswell) Owner's Lounge

Thank you for the reply. Going to the MaxxAudio panel via the icon in the system tray, changing preset (from "Music" to "Movies" for example) and then disabling/enabling the MaxxAudio toggle doesn't work for me. Is this what you meant or did I do something wrong ?

EDIT: Never mind, I eventually got this right. I disabled Realtek High Definition Audio in the device manager, which shut down MaxxAudio, then enabled it again and now everything's working right like it should

 

Just got new xps 15 and ... system doesn't see wireless adapter. By "don't see" I mean it doesn't see hardware at all (no entries in devices manager); lspci under linux shows no network card (while it should show it like here Dell XPS 15 Touch 9530 - Gentoo Wiki)

Time to call for dell support :-(((((

EDIT:

Also when using "diagnostics bios" then "Video Fan" reports failure, error code 2000-0511, validation 95362, "the [video fan] fan failed to respond correctly".

SD card reader also not visible under windows and under linux

 

Now the i7 4712 makes an appearance in the dell UK website with a price drop of £50 !! I just got mine yesterday and it says 4702 .

 

I'm a bit pissed off by how much the price has dropped since I bought mine, especially as it dropped once before mine even arrived.

Then you get an email with 30% off, and then they refresh the hardware...

 

At least the only saving grace for me was I went for the mid tier one with some bargaining as the top end was priced way higher in the UK. Compare it to the US site and you would right away know that it was marked up. I know the VAT is higher in the UK but still it hurts...
Also the one that I got yesterday was a replacement. I had horrible time with the 1st one as it had HW problems with the Nvidia card. It took quite some time for me to check all the drivers and finally discover that it was a bad card !!
I hadn't heard many people except one complaining on this forum about a bad graphics card but I guess I am one of the lucky ones who was blessed with this in my first system. There were a lot of bad crashes but I thought it was Win 8.1 playing up. But now I have my replacement system I know how sweet this machine can be. To be fair to Dell they sent out a replacement system as soon as they saw the earlier one failed Dell diagnostic tests . The coil while is there is the new one also but the suspect coils seem to be placed differently than my first one. On the other hand I guess a lot of people like me really love this laptop,the specifications, the screen hence the emotional reactions(including me ) to the problems that we find .

 

What's the price drop? The top-spec was $2299 retail when I bought it in early November, and a few weeks later it went UP to $2349, which is where it's been ever since as far as I can tell. You can hardly base a price drop complaint around a 30% off coupon since they're extremely rare (though a few people got them during Dell's 10-20-30 Mystery Coupon event around the holidays) and those coupons are likely not restricted to just this system. And the hardware refresh is inconsequential from a performance standpoint -- plus it may turn out that people getting replacement motherboards for coil whine will get the new CPU if it's part of the redesign....

 

Can't see what the original price was, but I paid £1214.65 with a discount (whatever you get for signing up to VIP)

The price for the same configuration is now £1249 before any discount is applied.

 

In fact it looks like they've ditched the bottom tier machine here, we have the mid-tier at the bottom and then two configurations both at £1499 with no differences betwen them...

 

New owner here. Not sure how to search, but is anybody having issues waking the computer after sleeping (not hibernating)? The dang thing starts so fast it's hardly an issue but I'd like to know why it won't wake the screen whenever I open the lid after closing it earlier.

 

I have a similar issue - I don't have opening/closing the lid tied to wakeup/sleep, but when I do unsleep my computer via the power button, sometimes the screen doesn't turn on. It's a little annoying for sure - but usually closing the lid and reopening it does the trick.

 

1. Disable Intel Rapid Start. Woohoo7676, the inability to wake up by opening the lid is likely caused by the fact that Rapid Start is putting your system into its special hibernation mode (even if you select Sleep), which the system will not resume from simply by opening the lid. Come to think of it, I'm not sure this particular system even resumes from regular sleep that way, and I can't try it at the moment. And the blank display even after resuming with the Power button is also tied to Rapid Start.

2. If the above doesn't resolve the issue, update to the latest Intel GPU drivers that were posted to the Dell Support page for this system a few days ago.

3. To search these threads, I find it best to use Google and include the thread name, a few search terms, and then constrain the search to this domain, e.g. "resume from hibernation XPS 15 Haswell site:notebookreview.com". That "site:" trick is very handy for all kinds of searches when you know/suspect that what you want will be on a particular website and therefore only want to see results from there.

4. Since you're new owners, I would also highly recommend the XPS 15 Wiki, which contains many useful How-To's, things you may want to know about, and fixes for common issues -- like resuming from hibernation!

 

annoying problem ive got after updating the latest Intel GPU drivers, the little taskbar icon wont turn off, if I right click and disable it the next time i boot up i got some module error.

 

Same here. Tracked it down to c:\windows\system32\igfxosp.dll. I have no idea what OSP stands for, but that DLL loads as both a Context Menu Handler and a Property Sheet Handler, and disabling it quells the error. But since I'm not sure what that DLL does (and since I so seldom reboot my system these days), I'm leaving it on. If I had to guess, based on the fact that it loads as a handler for context menus and property sheets, it's probably involved in the "Run with graphics processor" context menu item.

On a related note, I tracked that down thanks to the SysInternals app "Autoruns", which is an amazing little utility -- so is most of the SysInternals suite, in fact. If you ever want to see EVERYTHING that starts up on your system, look no further. But please be careful in there.

 

must be some driverpackage related thing, didnt have the annoying problem before updating the drivers.

 

try uninstalling the dell driver and grabbing the intel one as it's the same version number. you may have to manually extract the files to a folder using winrar and update the drivers via device manager like I did on previous versions as I have not used direct from intel this time.

 

Hello everybody,

As someone said earlier, new configurations are rolling out in Europe.

Basically, we now have two models : one at 1499€ and one at 1799€. The only diffrences between the two models are the SSD drive and the 9 cell battery.

I am planning on taking the "mid" one, remplacing the 30Gb mSata drive by a Samsung 120Gb mSata drive (for the OS), and keeping the 1Tb HDD for data storage.

My only concern is the noise: can anyone tell me if the HDD can be heard or if it is "quiet"?

Thanks!

 

Don't worry, you won't hear the HDD if you have the coil whine.

 

Maybe coil whine issue will be fixed with the new CPU (i7-4712HQ) used...

 

Hehehe, I guess we won't know until the new systems start arriving to end users...

 

The price drop? The US is not the world ... ...
In Germany (top tier - best spec): € 1999,- / then: 1899,- / and now: 1799,- (since yesterday with i7-4712HQ, and new: Smart-Selection for the XPS 15 and standard delivery)

 

Damn. Totally my fault, but really bummed out. Been loving my laptop, but this morning I spilled a little bit of coffee on trackpad/keyboard. Cleaned it up quickly and keyboard seems fine, but now trackpad is being finicky. Sometimes it recognizes well, sometimes not. Gestures have completely stopped working. I tried rolling back the driver and reupdating it, but it is still acting wonky sometimes.

 

I've started just hibernating the computer when I close it instead of messing with the sleep. Is writing 16GB every time I close the computer bad for the HDD's long term health? I turned off the quick start hibernate business and returned it to the windows default via instructions from the XPS 15 wiki.

 

check your PM

 

How do I access the FasttAccess Facial Recognition Software that is meant to be installed? I have seen it on a demo and it states that it is included on Dell Laptops but I cannot find the option to activate this?

 

I don't remember my system coming with that -- did the demo you saw indicate that ALL Dell laptops ship with it? In any case, here's a Dell FAQ page that contains information about it and where to download it: Dell FastAccess 3.0 Facial Recognition Software Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) | Dell US. First hit when I googled "FastAccess Facial Recognition Dell".

 

No I just saw another person at work who purchased their XPS 15 in March with it already installed. I had an XPS 15 in March which had to be returned as the whine was unacceptable and also the touch screen was unresponsive , and this had the SW already installed.

 

The XPS 15 that has been delivered to me seems to have no recovery partition installed (it states files are missing), and there seems to be a bug in the Windows 8.1 install where it comes up every time with DLL missing. The solution seems to be a roll back and resinstall. I have read that Dell will send out the media , but I have no DVD drive so do they send a USB stick instaed?. Also if it is sent on a USB Flash Drive, can the partition be recreated with a clean install so I can easily refresh the system? As I am using the laptop to run VMWare and it is quite likely that I will need to refresh the Win 8.1 install when I mess it up.

 

has anyone tried to remove the intel sticker?

 

Yep, mine's now inside the flap on the bottom.

 

Can someone please advise Maxx Audio Drivers / App be available on this model? All I see if a Realtek Driver which has no control over treble/bass and the sound output is very deep and not so good for music listening. I seem to think that Maxx Audio was available in the past?

 

I was kind off in a similar situation as yours. Windows stopped detecting my recovery partition after splitting C drive into two. Have a look at this thread. May be the method suggested there can help you. In case you decide to try Dell DVD, you can create a bootable USB from those and reinstall. Windows 8 has a built in system restore. I believe it is very similar to the snapshot feature available in VirtualBox in that it restores the drive to the state it was in when the snapshop was taken.

 

Edit: double post

 

So does it come out easily or leave sticky residue? The rubber like finish of palmrest worries me...

 

I would suggest getting an iso of an original windows 8.1 update 1 image instead and putting the drivers on, the bios holds the key so it picks it up during install.

 

The drivers on Dell's site include MaxxAudio 3 and it's managed in the Dell Audio app that gets installed along with the drivers; there's no separate download. Apparently the driver bundle that actually shipped with the system included MaxxAudio Pro and updating the drivers switched that to MaxxAudio 3 for some reason, but it seems that driver version isn't available for download on Dell's site. I disabled mine since it was enabled by default and I hated how it made my external speakers sound.

 

I've had mine for about 3 weeks now and I'm thoroughly enjoying it. Managed to play BioShock Infinite Burial at Sea pt2 at 1080p on medium settings pretty smoothly too which was nice considering some of the horror stories on here.

However, I'm having atrocious resume times when waking from sleep or hibernate. It takes probably 5 times longer to wake from sleep or hibernate than it does from a cold boot.

I looked at the disabling Rapid Start article on the Wiki but it says this:

This confused me because I do care about my resume times... I'm running the mid-tier 1TB HDD, 23GB mSATA and 16GB RAM.

Any thoughts?

 

With this laptop I would invest in a better mSata SSD and go for broke, you will never look back. grab an mSata 840 evo 250 or 500gb drive, disable the rapid start, grab an iso of windows 8 core and download all the dell drivers so you can have a fresh start. it will run 10x faster and thanks to the serial being in the BIOS it will add that and activate the 1st time you go online.

 

Ok so I got my laptop today and so far most of the things seem okay. just have one problem, the hinge seems a bit loose. when i close the lid and place the laptop perpendicular to the surface, the gap between lower half and lid increases to about 3-4mm. is this normal? thanks.

edit: one more thing, what transfer speeds do you get in the top end version? i get only about 100mbps from usb3 hard drive. i was expecting about 200. thoughts?

 

hinge is normal, usb is also normal for a platter drive.

if you hold the laptop the other way round it doesn't happen, clever eh ?

 

I wrote that section of the Wiki, which I've just tweaked for more clarity and to explain the behavior you just mentioned here. The reason your resume times are so high is because Rapid Start isn't working on your system because the partition from the factory is sized incorrectly, as I noted in the article. Therefore your hibernation file is being written to your spinning disk (which takes longer to read on resume), whereas the data necessary to boot your system is likely cached on the mSATA SSD thanks to Intel Smart Response.

If you have the mid-spec and 16GB of RAM, you'd need to increase the size of your Rapid Start partition from the factory 8GB to 16GB. But as I said on the Wiki, to do that you'd be giving up Smart Response. I understand people care about resume times, but most people care MORE about how quickly the system performs when they're using it (they would be the "and/or" category that you read on the Wiki). Therefore given that you can't use both Rapid Start and Smart Response on a system with 16GB of RAM, I recommend getting rid of Rapid Start entirely and increasing your Smart Response allocation (and possibly putting it into Maximized mode, for which I wrote a separate Wiki article). Your resume times will be slower than booting for the reason I described above, but you'll have a faster overall system. If you go the other way and get rid of Smart Response to enable Rapid Start, you'll essentially be disabling the mSATA cache, so your system will run as if it only had a spinning drive -- except when it comes to entering and existing hibernation, which will be fast.

And of course you could just use Sleep rather than Hibernate to get faster resume times if shutting down and booting cold all the time isn't an option.

Lastly, keep in mind that even on a system WITH Rapid Start (or a fully SSD system), a system taking longer to resume from hibernation than to cold boot could definitely happen. If you're using a significant chunk of your RAM when you enter hibernation, it will take time to put all of that back into RAM, whereas cold booting starts with only a baseline footprint. In such cases, the only benefit of hibernation is the ability to maintain your session state, not a shorter time to having a usable system again.

 

Use a pencil eraser. I did this to get my 'refurbished' sticker off the bottom. If you use a solvent you will certainly ruin the bottom rubber irreversibly.

Sent from my SCH-I545 using Tapatalk

 

For someone who asked about Dell USB boot media, I was able to order one on phone. They tried very hard to convince me to order it online, and I would have but it wouldn't work. Note that I haven't used it, so I don't know if it actually works or not.

 

that i7 sticker on both of mine basically fell off as it is silicon and couldn't stick to it ?

as for the bottom, well it's carbon fibre so any solvent will work without ill effect. in fact orange, lime or lemon juice is probably best to get rid of sticker residue as thats whats in natural sticky stuff remover we use at work.

 

The i7 sticker comes off very easily. no marks or any anything sticky remains. though i must mention i took it off within 5 minutes of getting the laptop.

also, i feel really concerned about the weak hinge. even my old inspiron 15 sits tight when closed. this one just opens up a bit due to its own weight.

 

I don't consider it weak I just think it's due to the lid being so light and having no lock more than anything. If you have a good panel with no dead pixels and no fluff under it then stop right there as you have the holy grail of 9530 panels, any service call will result in a contracter showing up who is paid per job, all he will want to do is swap it for whatever he has been sent and that no doubt will be worst than what you have. I tend to find shutting it firmly helps more than anything else & a few weeks of use helps it close better as it's stiff when new.

 

What is located between screen around "dell" text and F8/F9 keys? It's hottest area here, so I wonder.

Or maybe there is somewhere a photo with internals described?

 

All the heatsinks are under there I think, but the fans are left and right, so that's probably just the bit that gets the least airflow.

 

I have been updating my NVIDIA GeForce driver with the generic version available via GeForce Experience app (v337.88 I see is the latest one).

However, I see both the Intel and NVIDIA Dell specific driver packages have been updated recently via support, and I'm wondering now whether it was a mistake to download and run generic drivers. Is it generally recommended to stick with Dell's release or is it OK to use NVIDIA's generic drivers? I haven't experienced any issues, but I think maybe I should remove the NVIDIA drivers and re-install with Dell's latest, and stick with official updates in future.

Would appreciate anyone's input on this!

 

The generic Intel drivers won't even install on this system (unfortunately) without manually modifying some files, last time I checked. But I and several other people here run NVIDIA's reference drivers because they get updated more frequently. I also use Intel's WiFi, Bluetooth, and Rapid Storage Technology drivers, fwiw. There's no need to stick with OEM drivers unless you encounter problems with the generic drivers that don't exist with the OEM drivers, though I've never seen that happen with NVIDIA and Intel drivers myself.

 

the intel video drivers are easy enough to install last time i tried, right click the exe if you have winrar installed and extract to a folder, then from device manager update the driver and point to the folder.