XPS 15 (Haswell) Owner's Lounge

Does the 3200x1800 display use a PenTile type subpixel arrangement or an RGB stripe?

 

Is there a reason you're not using Intel Rapid Start? It's basically the power savings of hibernation combined with the fast resume of sleep; the only downside compared to regular sleep is that the time to enter Rapid Start hibernation is closer to regular hibernate than regular sleep (but still fast since you're writing to an SSD). I've tried it several times here without any issues waking up. The only weird thing is that after you press the Power button to wake it up, it takes about 2-3 full seconds actually powers back on; at first I thought I had a flaky Power button! But when it does power on, it's immediately ready to go, so resume really is that fast.

Anyway, unless you can't spare the space on your SSD or you're running full disk encryption and are concerned about unencrypted memory data being stored on the disk during Rapid Start hibernation, definitely use that instead. Basically you just enable it, set the Hibernation Timer to immediately, and then whenever you choose Sleep, it automatically enters Rapid Start hibernation instead. Then disable regular hibernation completely in your Power Options, i.e. automatic hibernation after a time period, and hibernate at critical battery level. The former should be set to Never and the latter should be set to Sleep, which Rapid Start will switch over to its hibernate mode.

 

This sounds really helpful and I was exactly planning to buy a mid model and swap mSATA myself, although it's a little waste that the original 32GB mSATA has nowhere to go. Maybe sell it?
For now, I'm just waiting for more customer reviews of M3800, to see whether it also has the same flaws in XPS 15.

To sum up, below are the several widely reported flaws in XPS 15(correct me if I'm wrong)
1. Screen dis-colouring (It's been corrected that it's touch pad dis-coloring because of finger oil. Regarding the screen, there are two instances reporting pressure point that requires replacement.)
2. Touch-screen non-responsive, after wake up or out of no reason
3. Touch pad sensitive problem.
4. Electric whining sound.
5. Wifi connection (not sure whether the driver update has fixed it or not)

 

I doubt you'd get much for the 32GB mSATA drive. Pretty much anyone who could use one probably already has one that came with their laptop anyway. The M3800 is identical to the XPS 15 except for the GPU, so any differences in reported problems would probably be due to just how many people have each one and how picky people are, not due to a difference in the models themselves. As for the issues you're listing, see my answers below:

1. It's the touchpad that reportedly discolors, not the screen. A couple people have reported dead/stuck pixels and dust that seems to be underneath the glass, but that's a QC issue, not a design issue.
2. Touchscreen becoming non-responsive seems to happen, will probably be fixed with a firmware update. At least on Win8, the option to prevent the touchscreen from going to sleep doesn't seem to be available, which apparently fixed the issue on an XPS 12 in a thread about it. I haven't had mine go unresponsive, but I've also hardly used it.
3. My touchpad is fine. I went straight to the Synaptics drivers based on what I read here, and although it was infuriating for the first few minutes before I configured it, after I disabled some functions that got in my way (mostly the Edge Gesture), I find it completely usable. I don't have any issues with it not registering clicks in either of the bottom corners. I don't use tap-to-click though, so I can't comment on how well that works -- maybe that's what people are complaining about? Haven't really had any issues with palm rejection not working, but I also haven't used the touchpad much since most of the time I'll be using an external keyboard and mouse.
4. I have a small electronic sound that's exactly like the Precision M6300 I had before this one, and exactly like what I hear with lots of other laptops. It was louder and more noticeable in the first few hours I used the laptop and has since quieted down significantly, so maybe the complaints here are from very first impressions? I still hear it a bit, but honestly you have to be in a very quiet room to hear it. Even my external hard drive drowns it out. Of course different people have different sensitivities and different laptops may be making different levels of noise. But that's a pretty standard laptop noise in my experience.
5. No problems at all with Wifi. I went straight to the Intel 16.6 driver.

 

That's nearly correct, but just to clear a few items up:

1. If there's 'dis-colouring' happening it seems to be the trackpad, not the screen.
2. There do seem to be some touchscreen problems, but those seem to be Win 8.1 issues (the same problems are being reported on other machines running 8.1 on other forums), we need to work on MSFT to get a new driver.
3. Yes, but seems to work okay with some tweaking
4. Some have reported this, yes, but not all
5. Wifi issues have not been widely reported. It seems that a driver update has helped those who were having problems
6. One other issue that you didn't mention: it seems as though battery life has been significantly south of what Dell has advertised on all models.

Those seem to be the biggies.

 

1. No screen discoloration. There were two instances of a pressure point on the screen requiring replacement but nothing major. Some people have complained of the touchpad being discolored, but in all honesty it is just oils in your fingers depositing on the touchpad. Nothing Dell can do about that really, they could change the coloring on the touchpad perhaps to make it less noticeable, but Dell can't keep your fingers from being oily....

2. I have not had this issue, a couple of people have though. It sounds like a driver issue with low power states and not waking the touchscreen.

3. I have no complaints with the touchpad. It works just fine for me, there are ALWAYS complaints with touchpads though on any laptop.

4. Yep people have reported this, I don't have it on mine. It is a common problem on laptops to have people report this, often times a replacement motherboard can fix the problem.

5. There is no widespread wi-fi problem. Only one instance of bad connections really is reported in this entire thread, most everyone has strong wireless connection.

 

Are Dell and Costco the only places selling the new XPS?

Costco is a few hundred cheaper than Dell

Costco - $1999 for the high-end(?)
Dell XPS 15 Touchscreen Laptop | Intel Core i7 | 2GB Graphics | Quad HD+ Display | Backlit Keyboard

Dell - $2299 for the high end
XPS 15 Touch Screen Laptop Details | Dell

 

Thanks for clearing it out.
And also thanks to kaborchers and Erasmus354.
This surely will wipe some doubts for some customers that are planning to buy XPS 15, such as me.

But regarding whether M3800 and XPS 15 are identical except for GPU, I still doubt it. At least, somewhere in M3800's thread, a quote from Dell's online chat shows that M3800 has a different motherboard. I also remember there was 'M3800 has better build quality' in that quote.

 

Regarding battery life (I have the 91WHr):

On my first charge I managed somewhere around 8+ hours of usage which seems to be higher than most people are reporting. I didn't actually use it that long but after about 6.5 hours or so I was at 25% and it said I had about 2.5 hours left. I haven't done a whole lot of fiddling with power settings yet. One thing I did do is set my preferred graphics card in the Nvidia controls to the Integrated Graphics. I will manually set 3d intensive games to the 750m. I think one of the problems people might be having is poor Optimus graphics switching, but that is just a hunch. Also this was with relatively light usage mostly web browsing / downloading / installing and about 2 hours of web video streaming. I turned the brightness all the way down and didn't have any problem seeing the screen.

I think part of the problem with battery life expectations people have is the fact that work load plays a huge role in battery life. I think that Dell can do some driver optimization to improve the battery life by about 20% if they really want to (and I hope they do). However a lot of the complaints are people that don't realize they have a workstation level machine. This is a quad core CPU, not a ULT dual core. Look at Notebookcheck reviews, and you will see battery life that ranges from 12 hours down to 2 hours on the same machine depending upon the workload. I expect I can get my machine to surpass the 11 hours Dell rates it for with a light workload of just web browsing with no video streaming (which is what the note for that battery life says).

I think the upcoming Notebookcheck review will show the widely variable battery life of the unit, and hopefully that will clear up peoples expectations.

 

Are you saying that the "touchpad discoloration" is just grease from the fingers? If so, can it be easily wiped out or cleaned?

 

Probably not completely. You are likely always going to notice some discoloration after prolonged usage, it is mostly unavoidable.

 

I tried that on mine, wiping it off with a rag.. and it didn't help, but yes it is your oil on your skin causing that.

The other issue with the Touchpad was that it registers two finger clicks as one finger clicks if your fingers were too close. XPS was the only laptop I have ever had where the whole pad clicks, so this could be a problem on all just for me. I tried a rMBP too, and did not have this problem though. Frustrated me.

I still think it was a good pc, just didn't deliver the experience I wanted in that price range.

 

Also there is a chance that eventually it just evens out from the original color, and you would never be able to tell. This is what will happen more than likely.

 

Also to the guy thinking of selling his msata, how much would you want for it ?

 

I have Rogers' S4. That's exactly what it was doing on mine. Try rebooting your computer (full power cycle, not just sleep). I think that's what fixed it. Maybe there is an issue on the initial download/install.

 

Actually ironically due to the new Windows 8 Fast Boot feature (which is on by default), a restart is actually a more "complete" state reset than a full Shut Down. The latter now essentially hibernates part of the kernel to allow Windows to boot faster when you power back up, whereas a restart actually flushes and reloads everything. There are several articles about this if you search Windows 8 Fast Boot.

 

How to Make the Windows Desktop Work Well on High-DPI Displays and Fix Blurry Fonts

great article on how to fix blurry text in Chrome. Looks just as beautiful as IE now

 

Im about to pull the trigger on on the new XPS 15 W5111T2AU - in Australia currently $1999, down from $2499 until the end of the week. Just wondering about the HDD situation. IT comes with a 1TB HDD but I wanted to put in a Samsung SSD 512 or 1TB - is there space available for a second HDD? If not is it worth installing the samsung or just going for the model that comes with a 512GB SSD - problem is that is $2899 - so thats $900 for a 512GB SSD - WAY to much.

Also anyone here using this QHD screen with Adobe software? Just wondering how apps like lightroom, photoshop and premiere handle the high resolution.

 

The XPS 15 has an mSATA slot and a 2.5" bay. Your spec would come with both filled, so you wouldn't be able to add an SSD without replacing one of the existing devices. If you replace the mSATA unit, you'll have to tweak your SATA mode in the BIOS from Rapid Response to AHCI mode so it becomes an independent drive rather than a cache.

As for QHD with Adobe stuff, Googling "Adobe Windows HiDPI" would be your best bet for information, but from my reading on it out of curiosity I seem to remember that Lightroom and Premiere work pretty well, but everything else doesn't primarily because the tools are miniscule. An Adobe staffer in a thread claims that even with Windows 8.1, the APIs they need in order to code their apps properly just aren't there yet, so they don't have an ETA on when updates will be forthcoming because they're allegedly working with Microsoft to get the OS-level support they need before they can fix their own apps.

My personal experience with QHD is that it doesn't interoperate very well with regular-DPI displays. At my desk I have two external displays, and if I optimize the DPI for the QHD panel, then everything is basically downscaled when drawn on the regular-DPI displays. That doesn't look too bad because you start with high-DPI graphics and scale down to regular, but unfortunately that requires me to keep the built-in panel as primary, which doesn't make sense with my desk layout. I really wish you could optimize the DPI for a non-primary unit, though even there the displays I use primarily would then not look as sharp as they would if I were optimizing for them. But if on the other hand I optimize for my desktop panels, regular-DPI content gets blown UP for the QHD panel (not sharpened, just essentially zoomed in), and that makes the QHD panel look worse than a regular one -- plus not everything is scaled up correctly, for example the taskbar doesn't scale, so it's still miniscule when the QHD panel is being used alongside regular DPI displays that are configured as primary. So at the moment I use only my external displays or only my QHD panel at any given time. And even that can be tricky. For example, Remote Desktop isn't DPI-aware, so if you use the QHD panel even with scaling turned on locally and start an RDP session, the session itself won't use DPI scaling, which makes everything awfully tiny on the machine you're RDPed into.

The bottom line in my mind is that Windows (not to mention third-party apps) by and large just isn't ready for QHD yet, especially when used in a mixed environment. I'm still glad I bought this panel though because I expect things will get much better on the software side long before I want to buy a new laptop, so until then I've essentially just futureproofed myself with something that works sort of well now and should work great hopefully soon.

Of course Dell next month will be releasing a 32" 4K desktop panel, and I suppose that if BOTH your built-in and external panel were HiDPI, it could be pretty sweet.

 

You're never going to completely get rid of skin oils with just a rag/paper towel/whatever. Using water won't help either. You'd need something to actually break up the oil, like soap or rubbing alcohol (rubbing alcohol in particular is safe to use on electronics). As far as I can tell, the trackpad is glass with the black coloring underneath, and there doesn't appear to be any coating on it that would degrade because of skin oil. However, it does have a very matte finish that could hold oil.

I haven't noticed any discoloration on mine, though.

Edit: I just tested with an isopropyl alcohol wipe all over the laptop, and it's perfectly safe to use. Don't listen to johnnyguy, he doesn't know what he's talking about.

 

Thanks for all the info! I guess I will just see how it handles with the config as is then decide if I want to swap something out for a bigger / faster SSD. Its a shame its taking so long for everything to migrate for qhd support but like you I guess we cross our fingers hopping our screens are ready for when the industry finally catches up.

My only issue now is the $500 off discount ends this Thursday but on Friday, Australia has its online black Friday deals. What to do...

 

I wouldn't count on Black Friday deals on the XPS 15. I actually work for Dell (not in any capacity that's relevant to products we sell), and I got an email previewing the Black Friday deals coming up. They're all on larger-volume, broader-interest models like the Inspiron 15 7000 and such.

 

Mine comes in tomorrow. I ordered through Costco. Can't wait to feel this machine out.

 

Good to know, do you think its worth calling up to place my order? Im actually buying two - would it be possible to get an even better deal?

 

I would NEVER USE rubbing alcohol on anything like a laptop or TV its gonna melt the plastic what a stupid suggestion!

Just use windex on a microfiber cloth or for example Costco has a screen cleaning liquid on sale or any screen cleaning product for LCD TV screen will works fine. Or if you don't wanna spend money use a soapy water than clean water damp the cloth with it.

Good luck!

 

Definitely can't hurt to try! I don't know the intricacies of the Sales team, but I've heard that some people get a few percentage points off the retail cost just by basically asking for it, so you may as well. Good luck!

 

You should keep your mouth shut if you don't know what you're talking about. Windex has isopropyl alcohol (aka rubbing alcohol) in it. Melt plastic? That's the stupidest thing I've heard all day. It CANNOT melt plastic. They sell the stuff in plastic containers.

Just to prove you wrong, I went and grabbed my 70% isopropyl alcohol wipes, and tested one on the trackpad (glass), the laptop bottom (epoxy), the palm rest (silicone), the screen (glass), the lid (aluminum), and the keyboard (plastic with printed letters). Absolutely no damage to any of them. The only thing I've ever seen rubbing alcohol hurt is powder coat paint finishes on metal.

Isopropyl alcohol is perfectly safe to use with all electronics. The screen protector I bought for my phone came with an alcohol wipe to clean the screen. Alcohol is what people usually use to clean old thermal paste off their CPU's when repasting. We use alcohol on/around electronics all the time at my job. No issues. It's also a better option than water because it evaporates MUCH faster.

Check your "facts" next time before calling someone out.

 

You got to this before me. I just want to add soapy water, or any non-distilled water is can damage electronics. Distilled water can be safe if there are no impurities to make it conductive.

 

What country is that from - keyboard quite different

 

I generally agree. I think regular tap water would be okay if the AC adapter and battery are BOTH disconnected, or if you're really careful using it on the exterior, but there's no reason to go through the hassle or risk anything when alcohol works well.

 

Dell just got back to me re: the quoted 11 hours battery life... apparently their "11 hours" includes suspend and hibernation time.

Assuming this tech was right and considering hibernation is the computer actually off, I wonder why they don't just quote 2 months battery life and be done with it.

Running off an external monitor (internal screen OFF), doing absolutely nothing (~1% CPU total in task manager) I see a discharge rate of 9.4W via BatteryBar. 91Wh/9.4W is 9.7hrs. This is absolutely the best case I'd ever be able to get out of the laptop seeing as its screen isn't even on, and it's not even playing a movie - just sitting on the desktop. The moment I start typing even on this webpage, it's up to around 11W (8hrs), which is still above what I get when using the laptop not on my desk/external monitor (~6hrs is best I hope for). Either way it's still short of what the Dell website says it gets on Mobile Mark 2012 (11 hours), which I seriously doubt is supposed to be run with the screen off and/or with the computer spending periods in suspend or hibernation, as the support tech claimed.

I don't know, just not happy that they advertise it as "up to 11hrs" as tested on a third party benchmark program despite that no one's actually going to see anything within an hour of that even on the lightest of loads, at least with the release drivers.

 

Hi everybody, great thread, looks like a very good product, and I have my eyes on it as well. However I can't buy it directly from dell in my country so I'm looking around.

Could anybody post a picture of the uk keyboard layout? It seems that in Europe they only sell national versions of the keyboard and the UK one seems to be the closest to the international version for me. I would really appreciate it.

Thanks

 

Just got mine today – highest model with 512 GB SSD.

Ordered from Costco on 11/12 for $2,000+$30 s/h – at time they said preliminary ship date would be 12/3. Then I got notification that it was shipped yesterday 11/24 and got it today 11/25 (fedex).

Everything seems to be working fine right out of the box:
*No noises.
*No problems coming back from sleep.
*Cold boot takes 8 secs.
*Speakers sound fine (it is a laptop).

*Bios version that shipped with computer is A00. I guess I’ll need to update this from Dell support page but I am not in a rush because I am not having any problems.

*Wifi works fine and the driver that shipped with the computer is intel 16.5.3.6. This is a later version of the driver than some others must have had because they said they updated to 16.5.3.6 from the Intel website and that fixed their problems. The current version on Intel’s page is 16.6.0. I am in no rush to download the latest because I am not having any problems.

*Touchpad seems to work fine, although I do get the spike in CPU usage (to 3-4%) that others were reporting. Firefox 2-finger scrolling works just fine. Driver that came on machine is Synaptics 17.0.13.0. Latest generic version on Synaptics website is 17.0.19, so I could update this, and maybe will if I have problems and get frustrated.

 

Picked mine up today and working on it now. Thought I'd do a rundown of the known issues and compare them to my device's performance.

For context, I updated the bios to a01 and updated all the drivers to the current ones available on the dell site. Any reason why the site continues to tell me I need driver updates when I've already installed them? That's a little irritating.

Overall impression of the laptop is very favorable. Great build quality and really nice looking machine. Love the keyboard and etc. So, on to the issues:

1. Trackpad discoloration doesn't seem to be a big factor for me. I just went to turn on my overhead lights and there is a portion of the trackpad that is a little shiny, but it's not overly worrisome for me.
2. My touchscreen crumped on me once already! Not a huge deal as I went in to control panel to disable/enable under HID and it came back to life. I'm pretty convinced from all I've read that this is more of a W8.1 power management issue versus a dell issue. I don't think this is a problem specific to this laptop, per se.
3. Trackpad has been a mixed bag. The weirdest thing for me, I'm a bit of a Chrome lover. The trackpad is miserable, I mean terrible on Chrome. Not a big fan of IE, but I have to say, my trackpad experience has been about an 8/10 for me with it. Everything works really smoothly and I have very few missteps. Additionally, Chrome looks pretty rough on the high DPI display, even with some of the fixes mentioned here. Looks like I'll prefer IE for now until Google fixes it, at least on my XPS.
4. I don't have a whine, thank Buddha. I was a little worried about that as it sounded really irritating. If I put my ear down to the keyboard, I can hear something working away down there, but once I back away to even a halfway sitting position, I can't hear a thing. I'm in a perfectly quiet house and this thing is silent.
5. I have no problem at all with WiFi. I'm on an Asus AC router and I'm pulling anywhere from 40-60 Mbps over Comcast. I'm paying for 50. This is pretty much on par with the rest of the devices in the house.
6. Battery life is a 'we'll see'. I just unplugged a little bit ago as I started to write this post. I'm currently at 96% and showing 7:35 left on the battery icon
in the power saver mode. I have the big battery. I'll be pretty happy if it gets anywhere around that on trips/etc.

So far, so good. Pretty sure I'm keeping mine.

 

And for those of you who are interested in such things --

PCMark07 Score is 5872
3DMark11 Score is 2981

 

Its german.

 

Try going into the Nvidia Control Panel and setting the Integrated Graphics to the preferred graphics card. By default it is set to the Nvidia Graphics. Then go to the individual programs, and for the ones that need it (games) set it to use the Nvidia Graphics. This was the first thing I did, and to be honest my laptop can probably get 11 hours doing nothing but web browsing. As I said in my first post I got 8+ hours on my very first charge, and that included more power intensive video streaming and program download/installation (and about 10 hours of sleep).

Review Dell Inspiron 15-7537 Notebook - NotebookCheck.net Reviews

Inspiron 7000 series gets 12:07 / 6:32 / 1:07 on the three different load levels for the notebookcheck review. Dell quotes "up to 7 hours" for this laptop. Should they only quote "up to 1 hour" because that is all it gets on the higher load scenario? Dell says what test they ran to get their battery numbers for the XPS 15, it is a web browser test, so you should be able to tell that it is a very light load they are using to get that 11 hour number.

 

Does it mean that if I order from Dell.nl, the keyboard will also have Dutch on it? It's really a pain to order it in a foreign country while all I know is English.

I'm just annoyed that I'm bounded in the model language to which website I order it from, while no matter where I order, they're like all manufactured and sent from China, no offense.

 

I'm wondering if this is closer to rMBP quality or yoga 2 pro/Ativ book 9.

 

Your views are different maybe because you were lucky enough to have gotten a good battery.

"Workload" doesn't get any lighter than 20% brightness, slow browsing of a few websites/a few tabs, and messaging/typing. No photo, no video, no gaming, not even word processing. Basically you can't do much with a laptop without flipping the screen open and having the Wifi on at least, and this is giving me around 5 hours, which is less than half the 11 hours, and much less than what you're expecting to get. Even an hour or two less means a lot for a laptop. We all think 11 hours is a big joke, but 5 is a huge letdown.

I'm not too concerned about the graphics switching. I don't think I know the full details, but it seems to be running on the Intel graphics most of the time anyway.

 

Um do you have the 61 whr or 91 whr battery?

 

I have the high-end unit (91whr battery) that I purchased from Costco and I've been using it for a week now. I've not tested Windows 8 accuracy in regards to the battery meter, but It has never provided an estimate over 5 hours and that is with my brightness all the way down, Nvidia GPU disabled and just basic web surfing for usage. Has anyone complained to Dell about the 91whr battery life and if so, how did they respond?

 

On that same workload I got over 8 hours, so I would suggest something is either bad with your battery, or your power settings aren't optimized properly.

 

Thank you, i ll try that.

 

One more thing. The stupid my Dell app doesnt seem to open no matter what i do. An initial desktop icon is shown and then nothing.. Any advice?

 

same things happened to me a few days ago...i have no solution

 

Someone asked me to post a comment on the Acer I got, you can find it over in the Acer forum : http://forum.notebookreview.com/acer/724622-aspire-v7-482pg-9884-a-57.html#post9468422

It's not as powerful as the XPS, but so far I actually really like it.. Just upgraded to 8.1 so I will see if it has the same touchscreen issue as the XPS. Touchpad, although palm rejection doesn't work on it either, it is an elan pad vs synaptics, it doesn't auto trigger the right swipe in to go to the start menu like the XPS did. Screen is IPS and 1080p, so no problems with DPI Scaling, still looks nice.

For the 1200 difference, I was able to order a 30" monitor. Course I am not using it as my main machine, so YMMV if you wanted this to replace all your pcs or depending on needs. But since you wanted me to drop in and give a first impression, so far its pretty good. Except for Battery life.. but I think I will just deal with it.

 

Just to add my experience along with the others, I received my xps 15 on 11/8 and had the following issues:
* touchpad would click on things i did not intend it to
* bsod sometimes when waking from sleep (every time when waking from rapid start set to 0)
* palm rest was sticky
* cpu whine

I complained and got an exchange + $100 off, the exchange arrived 11/25 and had none of the issues above. On both laptops, I did a fresh install of windows 8.1 + bios update to a01.

 

I read though a few posts earlier on the CPU/GPU throttling while gaming. I am curious to know how that is going.

Is anybody still gaming with it? How is the experience?

 

Hello from the XPS 12 thread... I managed to hack the Synaptics touchpad on the XPS 12 (haswell) and given that the XPS 15 is no different in having a Synaptics touchpad. I recommend that you apply the hack for better usability. It adds a ton of features as well. Let me know if it works for you guys.

Here is the walk-through guide:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/dell-xps-studio-xps/693432-xps-12-owners-lounge-222.html#post9467464