XPS 15 (Haswell) Owner's Lounge

Same for me.

I hear the click sound but nothing ...
I think I will learn how to use it despite this

 

Pretty pissed off. Laptop was perfect last night, come home from Uni today and my screen has developed a really annoying problem. The TINIEST movement of the screen creates a ripple like effect in the bottom right hand side. Any vibration or even using the touchscreen causes it... Not sure how this has developed unless someone has physically come into my room while I was out and stepped on it?

I filmed happening, at the start I am applying minimal pressure.

http://www.youtube.com/edit?video_id=zkvYz4FBuvU&video_referrer=watch

Guess Im going to send it back, dont expect to see this on a £1700 laptop.


Edited to say I've also noticed it occuring on the left center too.

 

Personally I would do the full install on only the msata, with the 1tb unhooked, that way the MBR and other stuff can't sneak onto it. Sometimes it gets installed on a different drive.. then see if you can boot with just the msata installed... then try and nuke the 1TB externally and plug back in.

 

Well, why the ... didn't Windows create whatever partitions it needed on the mSATA when I clean installed it? Ugh.. loving Windows 8.1 more every day. Yeah, the mSATA Windows 8.1 system is a single partition. So I guess now Windows needs the system partitions from the HDD to boot the mSATA? And of course I'm like 10hrs into building the new system. I wonder if just nuking the main HDD Windows partition so I can delete the old Windows would work. Or does it need that, too?

 

Yeah. I guess that's what happened. MBR (or GPT?) on the HDD. Unfortunately, I'm already working on the new system and have no time to start over at the moment.

 

Soooo a factory recovery disk doesn't work when upgrading my msata. I swapped the msata, loaded my USB with the recovery program, and it said my 1tb disc is not big enough to do the recovery. There are only two options, full recovery and refresh. Tried both. Arg

 

My touchscreen sometimes fails to work. Is there anyone meet such issue and which driver control this touch screen?

 

It's not w8.1 specific, it's an old windows "feature" ... but I think it has more to do with which device shows up as the first/default/boot device, when you do the installation.

That's why I point out that configuring the boot sequence AND disconnecting irrelevant devices is probably the best path during a clean install.

 

Intel has the newest 32 and 64 bit drivers labeled as just 32 bit at the download center. The 32 and 64 bit driver are there though. I downloaded Wireless_16.5.3_e164.exe to get access to the extra monitoring tools.

If you open the Intel Advanced Statistics software, it will show you the wireless channels and bitrates being used in real time. It might help with sorting out some of the issues. In an area at work known to have really bad wireless reception, I could see that downloads were coming in over the 2x48 Mbps band, but I was only transmitting over the 1x12 Mbps band.

The next time I have the bottom off the M3800, I will pull one of the antenna wires and see if the Intel Manual Diagnostics Tool can see that there is an error. I know it would be rare for an antenna to not be hooked up, but the new connections are small.

Will also try to find an Aruba AP that will go faster than 170 megabits. Might have to buy an AC band router.

There has to be a reason that some people are seeing slow speeds and others are only limited by how fast their network is.

 

i just bought an ac router, the asus rt ac66u, my top config xps is on the truck being delivered today...though my ISP is giving me 50mbps down and 15mbps up, i will test and post my results with the ac router...

 

I'd imagine its more of a Windows issue than the computer itself, but is anyone else noticing Chrome acting VERY strangely on their unit? My tabs don't take all real estate they should (apparently a known bug with 8.1 scaling). More amusingly, though, if I drag a window so it starts going off the right side of the screen it starts stretching out like that side of the browser is getting dragged off towards some event horizon off the right side of my screen.

 

Mine is still in production. Patienty waiting... How many of you guys have a problem-free machine? How many of guys don't? I'm hoping that the guys without problems just aren't posting and enjoying their new machine.

 

Reposted your link below (your link went to the youtube upload page

 

Just cancelled my Dell order, and am now waiting patiently for my CostCo order... Unfortunately I will not have it I am sure for when I wanted it by.. but let's just see.

Talking to the Dell rep who tries to prevent cancellations "Oh Wow.. that is 200 bucks less than what you paid, yeah we can't do that"

Yeah then tack on the free warranty, and even added the 99 for 3 year square trade plan, and I think I'm set. Getting closer to the price range I really wanted to be at.. now if all these problems I am seeing just miraculously are just some of the first runs and don't make it to mine.

 

You could try to use a program to clone your partition off, Easeus TODO Backup free and/or cloner actually works surprisingly well for some of that. Clone it off.. reinstall to just msata, and then recover that partition back over the new partition on the msata (it has an option to put on a smaller partition). Might work..

 

Has anyone found a resolution to the noise from the power port? I can confirm that mine is only audible when the power is connected and the battery is close to 100%.

 

Whoops haha, thanks!

Just to update, theres a tiny cluster of dead pixels in the screen which produces the above effect in a circle on the top left part of the screen now, and another in the bottom left. I have no idea how this has happened but Dell are having someone replace the screen when one becomes available. Not sure wether to send it back for a new laptop instead though.

 

I also just cancelled my Dell order and am now ordering via Costco. Might as well use that membership I have.

 

the same issue. Any expert can solve this?

 

It should be possible for that one to work well ... I have one at home and get 700 Mbps links often/usually on my L521X, and consistently get 400 Mbps throughput between two notebooks with 7260's in them (a studio xps 1645 and the l521x), so that's an aggregate of about 800 Mbps.

Note: It seems slower when going wlan to lan or lan to wlan, but I haven't had the chance to spend real time working with it. It could just be that my one machine that is on the lan is limited itself.

 

Its only happening when the laptop is plugged in AND the battery is fully charged. I tried all battery settings in the BIOS without any change as well.

If the laptop is unplugged, no noise.

If the laptop is charging the battery (not yet to 100%), no noise.

There is no perfect machine, for any amount of money. Personally... I'm just going to live with it but I could see how people working in very quiet environments could see this a deal breaker.

 

I think everyone probably has this issue. Mine does it too but it's not very loud so I just ignore it.

If it only happens when nearly full power or plugged in, it might be the battery itself, or the battery interfering with the USB ports. I don't know that it'll be user serviceable, but if enough people complain about it, Dell will likely figure it out and fix it pretty fast.

 

While I agree it's only slightly annoying, I'm more concerned as to whether there is long term damage happening to the machine. It's obviously not normal so I'm hoping it won't screw up the USB port or the battery or something else in the machine.

 

How loud are we talking here? It's barely perceptible on my machine, but it's in generally in a room with 3 other machines, one of which is my desktop which is pretty loud for a watercooled box.

 

Something you'll definitely notice in a silent room. Maybe not so much with three other active machines.

 

Finally they shipped it for crying out loud!!! But with everyone complaining about sound issues i'm not sure if i should keep it. Let me know your thoughts.

I picked up the Mid model
Order Date: 10/27/2013
Shipped On: 11/13/2013

 

The idling fan in my Lenovo W530 is louder, while I agree its annoying... its something that each person will have to evaluate.

 

Hmm looks like it was delivered yesterday..........DAMN dell tracking info was off. Its at my parents house.

 

Just got my XPS this morning (1tb HDD). New computer day... it's like Christmas and the 4th of July all rolled into one! Sadly, I actually have to get some work done today so I won't be able to dig in and configure this sucker till tonight, but I wanted to share some initial impressions:

-- Damn, this thing is sexy. I'm upgrading from a five year old Alienware m15x, so it's night and day. Super slim, super light, whisper quiet.

-- The screen is just astounding. Windows 8.1 will take some getting used to, but I look forward to customizing it. Definitely wouldn't want to use Windows 8 without a touchscreen. Speaking of which, the touchscreen has surpassed my expectations. Feels very fast and responsive.

-- The trackpad, however, isn't so great (as others have mentioned). Sometimes doesn't register my swipes, and seems to have trouble with diagonal swipes. It's not such a big deal for me since I almost always use an external mouse anyway, but I'm hoping some driver tweaking will help.

-- Speakers are very impressive. I had problems with my Alienware's speakers from day one, but I was very happy to hear the punch of the XPS.

-- I *do* share everyone's concerns about battery life. Out of the box, the battery indicator said 89% charge and 2 hours, 13 minutes remaining. I about flipped out. But I checked it a few minutes later and it read 89% and 3 hours, 50 minutes. Another check a couple minutes later said 3 hours 0 minutes. I don't know what's going on, but I'm hoping that new BIOS revision will help (I'll update all the drivers tonight).

Overall, extremely happy with the first impression!

 

Hello all, i am planning on upgrading to a 256 gb msata and running the O/S from there, what do you guys think of using DBAN on the 1 tb hard drive after installing the OS on the msata, ? will it completely wipe out the HDD, and leave me with the 1tb for storage?, i have never done this before , so thats why im wondering.....

 

DBAN will only wipe the data so its less likely to be recovered. You will get the same amount of space by using Disk Management and deleting all the partitions, then creating one large partition and formatting it.

Edit: also since you said you're new. You will never get a full 1TB of usable space. Marketing advertises the drive using base10 math... while the hard drive is actually calculating in base2. Thus you will always get about 70mb less per GB using the math that matters.

 

Yes, exactly, it's what I am worry about.

 

I just upgraded my mid-level XPS15 machine to a msata 256G. Originally I just wanted to use the recovery usb I created so it would be quick and be done with it, but Dell's recovery disk did not work. It said it needed a bigger hard drive (my 1TB was still there).

I installed from a Windows 8.1 ISO online (really pisses me off that I have to grab this from a torrent and not from Microsoft directly).
- Made sure the SHA-1 checksum matched.
- I removed all partions on both my new msata and the old 1TB HDD.
- I told windows to install on the msata

When it was done, the 1TB HDD was still unformatted and several partions where created on the msata. I then formatted the 1TB drive after booting into windows and installed all the drivers.

Kind of a pain. But there is no going back now as I stripped one of the T5 screws when I was putting it back on.

 

What is your boot time now (SSD), compared to before from the HDD?

 

anyone want to comment on running Memtest86+ on the new machine out of the box? worth it? skip it?

 

Definitely faster. I would say with the HDD it was maybe 10 seconds and with the SSD its a few seconds. But I have not timed it exactly

 

Just wanted to let you know that I got mine today (top spec), I'm really impressed and I already love it. I do hear that very weird noise but I barely notice it so I don't really mind. First thing I did was install a fresh Win8.1 Pro, I have to say the DPI scaling is a lot worse than I expected, a lot of message boxes are blurred, icons too small, etc, for the moment I just bear it but I hope Microsoft will seriously work on that. For those of you who are wondering, I just installed Visual Studio 2013 and it looks/works great.

 

Got mine yesterday (mid spec) but didn't get to try it out until today. It's pretty swank hardware. I installed my pre-existing Samsung 840 Pro SSD with Ubuntu linux on it. Only a slight hiccup in the video settings that had been saved from the previous machine needed to get deleted. Now I have the 3200x1800 built-in display, 30" 2560x1600 via mini displayport and 1920x1200 via hdmi all running at once.

I had planned on adding a bigger msata to raid 0 with the Samsing 840, but couldn't justify the cost right now... I'll keep that in mind for later.

I do occasionally get the annoying whine someone mentioned. Can't tell if it's just when the battery is charging or not. Sometimes it goes away even when the battery is charging. It's not super obvious, but definitely noticeable in a quiet room (with 2 kids, that's not something I have all that often

 

Is anyone else having any issues when using monitor independent DPI. I've got a 23" 1080p monitor that doesn't want to go to 100%, and if it does so does the screen on my dell. I've unchecked the use one scaling for all my displays checkbox, but it doesn't seem to be working, so I'm thinking some drivers might b interfering somewhere.

 

can you give us bit more details on how visual studio works with the laptop? is it loading fast? does it drain battery faster than usual? have you tried loading a "big" solution?
thanks for any input, this is exactly what i am looking for. Planning to use the laptop for my .net development.

 

So my touch screen has now stopped responding on 3 separate occasions (usually after the screen saver comes on). I'm hoping this is only a driver issue but can't seem to find the multi touch driver on Dell's website. Does anyone know where I can find it? Thanks.

 

Moved my post to a new thread...

 

Is anyone aware of a 24/7 phone number within the UK? I've come to the conclusion that the lid has definately succumbed to some pressure at some point and would like to arrange to return it for a replacement but am at Uni tomorow and wont be able to phone!

 

How do you (or anyone else that has tried the laptop) find the extra-wide aspect ratio to develop? Is it there enough vertical space? Is it so wide that is worth to keep two windows side by side maximised to half screen each?

I am trying to decide between the Dell and the Mac, and as I have seen the Mac seems to be a bit bigger vertically, while the Dell is shorter and wider.

 

Which desktop environment are you using? Unity, Gnome, LXDE, KDE, Mate, or Cinnamon?

I am a Linux user, and I am wondering how these environments behave with the high resolution, scaling, etc.

 

Thanks mate. Hope Dell can sort it out soon

 

Indeed, mine as well. The touchscreen does not work sometimes, but I cannot find the reason.

 

Awesome news re VS2013. I primarily got this laptop for development work.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

Eh?
They have the exact same vertical space, the Dell is just wider. 2880x1800 (1440x900 default) vs 3200x1800 (1600x900 default).

 

They have the same number of vertical pixels, but the Dell has some extra pixels horizontally. If you set them at the same resolution and DPI, you won't lose anything vertically on the Dell, though things would be just a tiny bit smaller due to the slightly higher pixel density (235 ppi vs 220 ppi).