XPS 15 (Haswell) Owner's Lounge

^ Had mine for almost a year, using daily. Like you, I had the Z13 before, and I've found that this has been a good replacement. The coil whine is not that intrusive - and it's certainly a lot quieter than the Z13, with the fan often not running at all (my pet hate for the Z13 were the appalling speakers and the noisy fan that never turns off). Wireless seems OK with the latest Intel drivers (though reception is not as good as the Z13). Disappointing that you need dongles for RJ45 and VGA but that's the case with the majority of lighter laptops these days. Also, I added a screen protector to remove the annoying reflections of the glossy screen. Generally I've had no issues. Great screen, great keyboard, good speakers, fast. Been very happy with the purchase.

 

I wouldn't say we're citing the warranty as this system's strongest asset. It's just a natural thing to mention in response to people fretting about possible hardware issues, and whether a particular user ends up needing it or not, the fact is that Dell's service policy is better than most other manufacturers' both in the length of coverage you can buy and the availability of on-site service options. I agree that it would be best not to need it at all, and I've been lucky not to have NEEDED any service on this system myself, but of course everyone's mileage will vary.

But for me the strongest assets of this system are by far the level of performance and connectivity that's been crammed into this size of package -- and a rather attractive and sturdily built package at that.

 

I guess you're right about the noise - but you can always turn fan noise off with Speedfan or by lowering cpu clock. Still, I haven't heard the coil whine - just the, er "whines" from owners! Totally agree with you about the Z13's speakers (if you think they were bad, you should have heard the Z2's - they were actually, much, much worse - like a laptop from 1989!) I replaced the speakers in my Z13 and it made a lot of difference - that and bluetooth speakers. Back on topic, I am pleased to here you've done so well with the XPS15. Thanks.

I hear you. As one who has never needed service on this model, it's easier for you to speak of the warranty as just a nice bit of insurance, but for what seems like the majority, the extd on site wtty is a necessity with Dells because they break so much and cost so much (labor) to repair.

 

A bit off topic, but I've never been able to get speedfan to control any of the fans on the laptops I've owned, including the VPC-Z13 and XPS. Though that's not really a problem with the XPS as the fan remains off for a lot of the time when you're not stressing it.

Separately, does anyone know whether, like the new M3800, the new XPS 15 will come with thunderbolt as well as the 4K display? The specs indicate not but it seems odd that the two models would diverge in that way.

 

Update: A day and a half later I have tried to start the system, and it works fine so far. I think I'll be cancelling the service (I don't want to risk a motherboard replacement, since this is apparently the only 100% noise-free XPS 15 in the world).

On the other hand, I am wondering what might the issue have been, and if it will reappear in a more severe form in the future... As troubleshooting steps, I tried to keep the computer off for a while, and even I disconnected the battery cable and connected it again, but nothing worked. Now, day and a half later, it just works...

 

Dell already announced I believe at CES that the current XPS 15 would get 4K. No word on Thunderbolt. I'd be surprised if they diverged the models too, but if Thunderbolt is expensive enough to add and easy enough to omit, they might consider that a pro user feature and leave it off, I guess. I'm amazed there was enough customer demand for them to add it in the first place, frankly.

But the roadmap indicates that the next-gen XPS 15 will get Thunderbolt, fwiw.

 

Bizarre. Did you ever try it with another AC adapter? I'm wondering if for whatever reason your battery wouldn't charge off of your AC adapter for a while and therefore it kept trying to start on a dead battery, hence it dying right away. Glad it's running again, though!

 

Yes, I tried it with another adapter. I also pressed the battery check button and the 5 lights went on.

The behaviour reminded me like a thermal shutdown had happened (i.e. something was too hot and was automatically shutting itself down). However, all this happened in a cold start, so it couldn't have been related to temperature. And I also tried to remove each of the RAM modules, in case any of them were broken, but nothing changed.

 

Update 2: And the issue reappeared. I was in Windows, everything froze, blue screen and shut down, and the computer wouldn't turn on again. Actually, a few minutes later I have tried again and it does turn on.

Anything I could try, or does it look like the motherboard is having energy or other issues? (I'd hate to have a motherboard replacement and then it was something else failing)

 

Hi, im just wondering how loose the charger connector should be in the laptop. Mine is pretty flexible.

 

Check Event Viewer to see if the details of the BSOD were recorded. If not (or if the error message isn't helpful), that's about it. You can try disabling automatic restart in case it happens again so you'd actually have time to read the BSOD, but even then of course there's no guarantee that it will implicate something other than the motherboard. Otherwise, you may be able to convince Dell Support (or as a last resort, the tech they send out) to replace only the thermal assembly and thermal paste initially to see if that resolves your issue.

 

Hello to all,

One question : Is there someone who had this issue?

My XPS 9530 mid tier (I7 4702 HQ, FHD Screen + 1 TO/32GB) refused to wake up during hours, after being sleeping. It was the 1st time I had this problem.
It happened sometimes that computer was frozen after sleep, and needed to be switched on again - or connected again with power cable, but never refused to wake up.

Note that, 2 days before, as never used because I'm not a gamer, and I wanted to check if there were some differences, I selected NVIDIA (750GT M) as main graphic processor.

Many thanks in advance for your comments.

In all cases, very happy with this compuer well built and fast. The FHD screen is good... and my daughter (2 years!) is happy with touch function.
To resume, a very good computer in spite of little bugs

 

Don't force the NVIDIA GPU to be used; I've found that the drivers are actually really good about choosing the appropriate GPU. Anyway, your wake from sleep/hibernation/Rapid Start issue has come up quite a bit. There's an XPS 15 Wiki article on it here ( http://xps-15.wikia.com/wiki/Windows_Fails_to_Resume_from_Hibernation), and if that doesn't fix it, make sure all of your important drivers are current: Intel chipset, Intel Rapid Storage, Intel WiFi 7260, Intel GPU, NVIDIA GPU. I'd recommend getting all of those drivers directly from Intel (except maybe the GPU if you're not comfortable doing a forced install from Device Manager, in which case get it from Dell) and get the NVIDIA driver from NVIDIA.

 

Same here. It's never created an issue for me though.

 

How much did you pay to extend warranty?

Maybe you could monitor temps with Core Temp.

 

About 180€ for 2 years, per computer (I think there was some promotion when I renewed the warranty, otherwise it'd probably been more expensive).

Thanks for the hint. I have it running and will check how it goes. 24 hours since the last shutdown. I think I am going to cancel the service until I have gathered more info, or until this issue repeats again.

 

I've just had a coulpe of blue screens with a "DPC_WATCHDOG_VIOLATION" (I disabled auto-restart, so I was able to see the error this time). However, this time the computer did boot (may the startup issue be related to trying to boot while the computer has still not recovered from the error, and avoiding the auto-restart avoids the power on issue?).
I've googled that error and it says it may be related to an outdated firmware for the SSD. But I haven't done any update to my mSATA SSD since I bought it (I read there was a firmware update available, is it possible to apply it to the SSDs that come with the XPS?). Still, the SSD has been fine for more than a year, why would the firmware update be needed just now? At this point I'd probably bet on the controller (i.e. motherboard).

 

I had that error for a while too, and it turned out to be caused by LogMeIn Hamachi, specifically its outdated virtual NIC driver. I uninstalled it and the problems went away, and since then they seem to have fixed it because I've installed a newer version and I'm still ok. I figured it out by using Microsoft's Dumpchk file. It's not especially user-friendly because it's aimed at developers, but if you open the minidump file in there and point the app at the public MSDN symbols repository to parse the contents out, it will open it up and say, "Crash most likely caused by [file]", even if the BSoD you saw didn't implicate a particular file. Sometimes that guess is accurate, and sometimes there's an underlying cause that occurred immediately prior, and since Dumpchk also shows some information about what led up to the crash, you may be able to find something in there. I'm sure a lot more information is available, but I haven't bothered to learn how to really use the app.

My current issue is that every now and then when I restart or cold boot the system, I'll get a BSoD on boot implicating the Intel Rapid Storage driver, but I'm also seeing this on a Latitude E7440. I'm wondering if it's because I changed both systems from their RAID/Smart Response mode to regular AHCI, and the weird thing is that if I keep pressing Enter enough times to tell it to try booting again, after 3-4 tries it boots just fine, so who knows? This has persisted across multiple versions of the Rapid Storage driver, and I can't imagine what else is common to both of my systems that might be causing this (I only use BitLocker on the XPS). But I also haven't looked into it deeply because I hardly ever shut down or restart, so this doesn't create much of a problem for me anyway. Still, I disabled Automatic Startup Repair because it got really irritating to wait for that to start and then try to fix problems automatically before letting me do something else. Now I can just have it retry while still having the option to manually enter Startup Repair if I ever want it.

But no, the official Samsung firmware updates can't be applied to the OEM versions of their SSDs.

 

Has anyone's battery gone to complete crap? I can barely get 2-3 hours now on lowest brightness and power savings mode.

 

The battery of one of my PCs is at 86% health after a year and a month (which is not too bad, but I would expect better since it is always plugged in and I have the setting "mostly on AC" in the BIOS).

Other than battery life, which battery health number do you get? It may be an issue with your battery, or may be settings or programs running in the background.

Also, which setting do you have in the BIOS?

 

Just captured a memory minidump on my last blue screen:

>> Probably caused by : ntoskrnl.exe ( nt+150aa0 )

Yay I have found a bug in the NT kernel. That, or my motherboard is broken.

 

Using BatteryMon to check, it shows my charge capacity at 51490 / 62020 mWh. So around 83%. My laptop is around 11 months old.

Edit: my setting in BIOS is also 'mostly on AC'

 

According to the Dell health check (F12) by battery is at 87% health. It is 9 months old. My BIOS setting is also at Mostly AC. I am plugged in literally 99% of the time. I guess this is the nature of the best.

 

I'd be curious to see the health of the battery of any user with a similar usage (mostly AC) who has set the BIOS to something fixed such as 50-90, instead of the "mostly on AC" option, to compare how effective these options are. Anyone?

 

I've been running 50/80 for a while now and almost never use battery power. I just installed BatteryMon and checked the Dell Battery Meter included with Quickset. I didn't find any information about overall battery health in the former, and in the latter the Battery Health tab only says that my battery is performing normally, no numerical value given. The only value is the current charge level on the other tab. Am I missing something?

 

I think I found the numerical value after restarting and running the Dell Diagnostics.

 

Same here. You kinda have to hold down F12 before you even turn on the machine and keep holding it until you see the Diagnostics screen... or else the post sequence is too quick.

 

3% battery wear, had this thing a year now, never changed the battery charge type iirc, or set it to AC.

 

In BatteryMon if you press on the menu Info -> Battery Info it can tell you battery health there too.

 

3%? That's amazing! What is your usage or charging pattern? Do you plug it only when the battery is low?

Mine has worn out 14% in a year, using it every day, almost always plugged, with just a few full discharges

 

Does XPS 15 comes with a charging limiter? The option to stop charging when it is fully charge and recharge it again when it is below certain %

 

my google chrome has alot of glitches now..this 64 bit chrome is very unstable..wht to do..is there no fix for this?

 

Yes, this was introduced in one of the first BIOS updates.

 

Chrome has been pretty stable for me - I would suspect your extensions before blaming the browser. Certain sites can be problematic too - I've noticed a few that sit there chewing up battery, memory and CPU (anything that polls in the background) - kill those tabs and things are good again.
I've normally got 60-70 tabs open across multiple windows and have not had very many full browser crashes - just recently got updated to v40. Another thing is if you're like me and keep the same browser open for weeks at a time, it DEFINITELY helps to restart it once in a while - if nothing else to let it finish installing pending updates (which aren't always obviously needed).

 

When I went in there, I didn't see anything about health. The percentage indicator along the right edge of the Info window is my current charge level, not my battery's health. I'll reboot into the Diagnostics at some point I guess.

Yes, it's had charge limiters from the very beginning, although initially the BIOS options didn't actually work. Now they do. The lowest you can set the "Start Charging" threshold is 50%. Unfortunately the one thing that's missing that I've seen on other laptops (including other Dell laptops) is a button in Windows saying, "Charge to 100% once". If I know I'm going to be away from my desk for a while later in the day and therefore want to force it to start charging now and go all the way to 100% rather than sitting there not charging (or stopping at my "Stop Charging" threshold), right now I have to go into the BIOS and reconfigure the charging profile to achieve that.

 

F6NVV 1 ASSEMBLY...,PRINTED WIRING ASSY...,NOTEBOOK...,I7-4650U,8,T,9333
Does anyone know what is this component? I was told that I would have my motherboard replaced for the freeze + blue screen + power on issue, but this (as seen in the parts associated with my call) looks like something else.

 

That's a motherboard, but "9333" is the model code for the XPS 13 generation that was just replaced by the one shown at CES.

 

Two of the rows on the left show

Design Capacity
Full Charge Capacity

I think if you do [Full Charge / Design], it gives you a idea of battery health?

 

Ok, I thought about that too but wasn't sure that was a legitimate indicator, although now having also checked Diagnostics, it seems to be. In that case, I received my system in mid-October 2013 and it seems my battery's full charge capacity is 99.7% of its design capacity. But like I said earlier, I run 50/80 in the BIOS and almost never use the battery, so it basically only drains due to self-discharge and then only receives current when that has brought it halfway down. I haven't paid close attention to how long self-discharge from 80% to 50% takes, but it appears to be at least a couple of weeks.

 

I've had mine for a year. I typically keep it at 50-90%, and use it on battery for a bit maybe 4 days a week. Battery wear is still at 0% (if the data is to be believed).

 

Sounds like 50/90 or 50/80 is the sweet spot rather than Adaptive or Primarily AC to keep your batter healthy long term if you are primarily plugged in most of the time. I wish I had set it to that 9 months ago.

 

Sure, if you're ok potentially only having half your battery available when you need it. I bet Primarily AC gives you better chances at having a more charged battery at any given time. (Again, having that "Charge to 100% once" option would drastically improve the usability of 50/90 and similar setups...) Plus keep in mind that you've only got 2 data points here, and I would imagine that hardly having used my battery at all since I got the system is probably a bigger contributor to its low depletion than my particular BIOS settings.

But if you hardly ever use the battery in the first place, then I don't see why it truly matters whether you've lost 0.3%, 3%, or 30% of your battery's capacity by now. To me it seems like people comparing SSDs that can do 400 MB/sec and those that can do 430 MB/sec -- sure the numbers indicate that one is better than the other, but does the difference translate to anything meaningful in your real-world usage?

 

Sure, losing 14% battery capacity is not big deal. Now multiply it by say, 5 years.

 

I was specifically asking whether battery wear would impact the real-world usage of someone who was using 50/90 settings and therefore probably not using the battery much at all, since cmoya was wishing he'd used those settings earlier to preserve his battery life. My point was that if you can put up with those settings, you probably don't use the battery very much in the first place and therefore wouldn't be affected much by battery wear. And if you can't use those settings, then battery wear is a fact of life at the moment, and there's no point in using battery settings that will preserve your battery wear if those settings cause you to sacrifice usability all along the way.

But anyway, battery wear is seldom linear and usually bottoms out above 0%. And if I were still planning to keep this system after 5 years, I would consider the cost of a replacement battery at that point a reasonable expense. At least the battery is user-replaceable on this system.

 

I can go 2 or 3 months plugged in 99% of the time but then go a couple of weeks where I'm giving presentations or onsite at a client and on battery most of the time. Also, the battery is technically replaceable but a bit difficult if you've stripped those annoying torx screws already.

 

Speaking of batteries - does anyone know if this would work with the XPS 15? http://accessories.dell.com/sna/Pop...&cs=04&sku=451-BBLZ&price=99.99&client=config

There also seem to be other portable batteries, but it's vague whether they would actually work with the XPS 15 or not (like http://www.amazon.com/Turcom-Capacity-Portable-Notebooks-TS-281/dp/B005IU34FU) Does anyone have any ideas or advice about what to choose for an additional portable battery?

Thanks

 

The problem is that the XPS 15 uses a 130W power supply, whereas most battery packs are only designed to deliver their current at a rate that matches 65W or 90W power supplies. Any of these third-party packs are also likely to trip the "Unrecognized AC adapter warning", which I believe prevents the system from charging off of them (it will simply draw current to run) and may also cause severe throttling if the system can't even get enough running current out of these things.

Ironically, Dell itself has just released the Power Companion, but it seems to only be compatible with systems that have been released this calendar year.

 

Ok, I have narrowed down the issue of the computer failing to power on. It turns out it was not time what made it power on again. When the issue appears (which is very random as far as I know, it even happened in a cold boot) and the computer fails to power on, if I unplug the flat connector that lies on top of the SSD and re-connect it again, the computer powers up just fine. I wonder what removing the cable and sitting it again is resetting, but now I am more positive that the motherboard replacement will fix this weird issue.

For those that may wonder: I am documenting this issue to receive suggestions from the forum where applicable, and also just to have the symptoms and solution documented, in case it happened to anyone else in the future.

 

Ah rats thanks for the explanation and info.

 

Hello all,

I updated the PM851 ssd firmware to EXT49D0Q, and unfortunately it is slower. I did however notice that the fan ran loud during my original test with firmware ext48d0q, and quiet during my second test after the update. Anyone have experience with this firmware update?