XPS 15 (Haswell) Owner's Lounge

It's very very hot for an external temperature on a notebook, I wonder if it can burn skin if you touch it.
Moreover I'm a little disappointed because Dell claims 400nits but this display is always under 350nits and there is an area under 300nits.
Maybe there is an error about price because seems they have reviewed top end unit but price is only 1719€.

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I'm returning mine to Dell. My battery life is on the low side (Max capacity is less than 91% according to windows). The coil whine is also pretty loud on my unit. The touch pad works ok most of the times but it will occasionally jump around. The Dell software update doesn't work on my computer; it shows the splash then nothing. The screen colors change and flicker when touching the screen on the right side of the panel... I'm worried about long term durability. Finally, sometimes, the computer won't wake up from sleep and I have to hard reset by holding the power button. I would accept these problems on a $1k laptop but $2300 is on the premium side and this is not acceptable to me.

 

I wondered about the price myself.. i looked and they stated the price without taxes like dell does on their business shop site.
Didn't know dell claims 400nits, but overall it seems a really good display, especially the measurements for blacks and contrast.
By the way wikipedia records 45 °C as minimum temperature to affect skin irritation within minutes. I guess that means no gaming in the nude with the laptop on the lap

 

Actually, a Dutch keyboard is very similar (identical) to a Qwerty-US keyboard. The only difference might be an additional EURO sign on the E key.
Qwerty-UK is somewhat different (it has the pound sign where the @ key is on QWERTY-US and some other annoying differences if you are used to QWERTY-US).
German (QWERTZ), French, Belgian (both AZERTY) , ... keyboards are much more different. There are pictures on wikipedia.

If the website doesn't allow you to choose your keyboard layout, you may still be able to change it by calling them on the phone (no guarantee though).

I'm in Belgium and am ordering a Precision M3800. The website only offered Belgian AZERTY keyboard, but I asked for a qwerty-US-intl keyboard through my reseller. It was no problem.

 

Now had my mid-tier for 10 days. I have adjusted display so it works well in various programs. I haven't updated bios or any drivers yet, but plan to. Getting just about 4 hours battery, would love more but hopeful this will improve with various updates. Can't hear any noise from the machine (by-product of loud music in the 60's/70's . I like touchpad and the shiny spot that I can see in certain light doesn't matter. This is the machine I had been waiting for!

 

Thanks jphughan!

I called Dell technical support and the guy there told me the same switching-on-the-fly story. Then he corrected himself to say that it doesn't do that; there is indeed an 8GB partition for Rapid Start and he said that it works ok for 16GB memory because 1) the in-RAM data is compressed enough to fit into 8GB on the SSD, and 2) it doesn't matter how much RAM you have, it matters how many applications you have running. I have a very hard time believing 1), but 2) would seem to lend itself to your theory that Rapid Start only works when there's less than 8GB of active data in the RAM.

I see the possible scenarios on the mid-tier unit as:
1) Rapid Start always works perfectly as is. Seems very unlikely, unless that data compression thing is real, but I heavily doubt that.
2) Rapid Start only works when less than 8GB of memory are being used. Some kind of unpublished workings would be involved.
3) Rapid Start just doesn't work. Seems the most likely. Either upgrade to a bigger mSATA, or get rid of the Rapid Start partition and just use the entire mSATA for Rapid Storage.

 

Compression is hugely unlikely. Not only would it make Rapid Start less rapid to start, I can't see the point. If they use compression then obviously it wouldn't always require the full amount of RAM space to exist on the SSD, but since compression is variable based on the type of data in RAM, they'd never know how much below your actual RAM they could require while still guaranteeing it will always work. So they'd play it safe and just say to size your partition to match your RAM, in which case there's no point to compressing anything and in fact it would be faster not to unless your storage was significantly slower than your CPU, but with SSD speeds these days that discrepancy just isn't large enough.

I believe Rapid Start won't work at all if the partition is too small based on Intel's documentation, but like I said it's easy to test. Try to enable it in the system tray utility and Sleep your computer when you have very little RAM in use, then watch the Power LED to see whether it pulses (still in regular sleep, not Rapid Start) or goes off after a few seconds (auto-switch from Sleep to Rapid Start hibernation).

 

I've had this for about 2-3 weeks and now my battery wear is at 7%. What are you guys wearing?

 

Apparently there is an issue with the 'my dell' app that is causing problems for some users. Just spent a considerable amount if time on chat and the phone with a dell rep that involved a refresh then a clean reinstall (luckily I didn't have much saved on the machine yet, also luckily this thing can do a complete clean reinstall in about 3-4 minutes, which is impressive). Even after all of that, it's not working. Looks like they have some patching to do.


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Flamer - There is no need to add exclamation marks to your question implying that you are frustrated because you think I failed to give you a critical piece of information. If you look at my entire post (#1637), I quoted an earlier post in which I mentioned many of the operating details of my current configuration including the model, bios, drivers, etc. I added that quote so people can know my operating parameters and better interpret my results.

 

Is there a wiki for this with problems and solutions or whatnot? This thread is ginormous.

 

so,

my xps15 (top spec, 90w battery, and so on) arrived yesterday (germany), just one day before they said delivery was postponed to december 3rd, maybe the ship had a little hyperdrive over from china. anyway.
so far i can't complain about anything - i'm coming from a sony vaio z11 (2010) which had a lot of problems with its internail ssd-raid and although it was a crazy expensive device it never worked reliable for me, many data crashes, tech support couldnt find anything - and that's why i'm realy relying on the xps now to be a brave companion to my workstation.

right out of the box i let it run on battery and with all installing and windows setting stuff it was samewhat between 4-6 hours. furthermore i did the bios update, installed some drivers from the dell website. removed almost all the metro stuff, installed classic shell for explorer and start menue, disabled the touchscreen, calibrated the screen with spyder3, and repartioned the ssd. during that time the fan was roaring only once, while i did the bios update. then i installed battlefield4 to check the gaming power, ran pretty smooth on 1080p, fan was doing its thing, but very bearable (vaio z fan was ALWAYS doing something).

since i use 24" monitors on my workstation and therefore dont need any dpi scaling in windows7 it was pretty tough to adjust to all the scaling in win8 on this highres screen at first, but i got used to it after a while. for the last couple of weeks i was working on a 15" MBPR in photoshop and other 2d/3d apps so it wasnt that much of a surprise. in some applications (skype for example) scaling looks horrible, so i excluded it from dpi scaling and used the internal font system to make the text bigger. what's really funny is that even windows itself has some dialogue boxes which look really ugly scaled up (with my 150% setting). colors looked a bit warm after calibration compared to my hardware calibrated NECs, so i went into the intel color settings and moved the red color to -4, looks almost the same now, but i will dive deeper into that color issue.

didnt use the trackpad that much, so i cant say anything to that. the keys and the whole surface attrack finger prints and oil a lot, but which laptop doesnt. always bring a microfibre cloth along with the usb-ethernet-adapter and you should be fine. same was with my vaio, anyways. ah i measured the ssd with atto benchmark and i got read 450 and write 530, should be fine. any other tests and benchmarks i will do next week, so if you have any suggestions or questions, feel free to shoot!

cheers,
peter

 

Is there a way to convert the XPS 15 charger to the older style Dell adapter?

 

What kind of settings would I have to have to get the battery life you're getting?

 

Not that I know of. The only dongle I'm aware of converts the regular connector to the slim version so you can use Dell's standard chargers with this machine.

 

What is this My Dell app? I wiped my system to do a clean install and kill those extra recovery partitions) and didn't see this app on the Drivers page of the Support portal. Does it do anything useful when it works or is it just an automated way to download drivers?

 

A couple TINY quirks about this laptop I noticed immediately but forgot to mention:

First, this laptop will ONLY output to the built-in panel until the Windows logon screen; there's no way to get the POST and Windows loading graphic to display on an external display, even when the lid is closed. Of course unlike dockable models, there's no way to power this machine on without opening the lid anyway, but at my desk I have a display that sits a bit over the lid, so I can open the lid enough to press the Power button but not enough to see the display without swiveling the external panel somewhat. So if you run whole disk encryption other than TPM-only BitLocker or will be doing anything outside of Windows (BIOS config, pre-boot repair, etc), you'll be using the built-in panel during that time. I imagine this could be fixed with a BIOS update, but for now that's the way it is.

And second, I noticed a quirk with the audio drivers. I have one song that exhibits about half a second of corrupt audio at a certain point. And yes I'm sure it's the driver and not the file, since I played this exact file through AirPlay to my living room receiver and on my iPhone without any issues. But I've been listening to a LOT of music since then and haven't found that garble anywhere else, so other people might never have a problem at all. I imagine a driver update will fix this. I thought about trying reference Realtek drivers but decided against it since I know audio drivers are tuned by OEMs for the laptop environment (HDMI audio, docking connectors, etc), so I'll just wait.

 

So my high end XPS is on the delivery truck. Really hoping I dont have any dead pixels/screen pressure. Also, hoping no high-pitched noises. Think those are the two things that would probably annoy me most.

I will be formatting right away with a fresh copy of win 8.1. Im not sure how I should go ahead with partitioning my drive. Should I just do one large partition or partition it in OS and Data partitions. In the past I have always used two partitions (as mentioned above), but it can get annoying having to resize the OS partition since the OS partition is primary and the Data partition is extended. I am thinking of two primary partitions, 60Gb/440GB (or whatever the remaining space after the 60gb partition is). Will I be able to easily transfer free space to the 60gb OS partition from the data partition using that configuration?

How does everyone partition their harddrives, care to share? Always looking for a better suggestion....

 

With one exception, I've never seen the point of data-only partitions unless you really expect to need to wipe your OS drive and want to use the Data partition to keep data intact without having to back it up elsewhere first (which is easy these days, come on) -- but even if you go for maximum operational convenience by using registry hacks to move user profile folders onto the D partition, that becomes more INconvenient when you reinstall Windows because you have to do all of that before the new installation will see the user profile folders over there. Every time I've had partitions I've ended up with more space than I needed in one volume and short on space on another, with no easy way to remedy that. The only time I've found OS/data partitioning convenient is when I set up this one server, because it allowed me to take a system image of only the OS+application volume as a disaster recovery mechanism without including the large amount of confidential data it stored, which I kept on a separate volume and backed up more securely. Windows System Image doesn't let you exclude individual folders from image backups.

Also, the problem with shrinking and expanding is that you can only expand to or shrink from the "right" edge of the volume. So for example if you have the C drive first on the partition map and the D drive second, you'd be able to shrink the D drive, but it would only free up space on the right edge of the volume, in which case to expand C to fill that space you'd have to convert C to a Dynamic Disk, create a separate partition in the new free space, and enable spanning to bridge C over there. If on the other hand you wanted to shrink the C drive, you'd be able to but would then not be able to expand D to the "left" to fill it. Again, you'd have to go the Dynamic Disk route. Using full-disk encryption (absolutely no good reason not to these days) can also be more complicated with multiple partitions, especially if you expect to be able to resize them after they're encrypted.

I used diskpart to clean my entire disk prior to Windows install and pointed it at totally unallocated space for installation. It created a small recovery tools partition, a mandatory EFI System Partition, and the OS partition. I then shrank the OS partition by the amount required to create the Intel Rapid Start hibernation partition, and that's it. Having THAT last in the map is great because if I add more RAM later (when 16GB DIMMs become available, assuming they work in this box), I can just destroy the hibernation partition, shrink my OS partition further, and create a new hibernation partition of the appropriate size. Or if for whatever reason I decrease RAM, I can do the same thing except extend my OS partition to fill the newly freed up space.

 

Thanks for your suggestion jphughan. The reason I have preferred the two partition system in the past is for the ability to format the OS (if it corrupts/virus/slow) without worrying if I need to have anything backed up before doing so since I already know everything I want is in the data partition. But as you outline, getting the partitions sized right, and resizing them is a big pain. While windows partition tool only lets you add space from the right, there are a bunch of free tools which move the partitions around and let you add to the C (left partition) easily. Backing up is easy now and thats a good point as well, the two partition method usefulness then is limited to a benefit only when windows corrupts/virus that prevents booting. I guess in this case I can just use a live cd from linux to back up my hard disk. I am leaning to just one partition now that I think about it more.

 

My new dell xps 15 has a weird almost mini screeching sound. Sound like the cpu because the screeching or wtv happens even when the computer isn't doing something, or maybe when you just open a program. Quite annoyed because otherwise it's such a pretty laptop. Haven't tested battery life so far.

Another issue is that changing battery mode from my dell to high performance drastically reduces screen brightness, even on max brightness. Anyone else noticed this or had this issue?

 

I've seen those tools that allow you to shift partitions, but at least when I last looked at them (which was admittedly a long time ago), they required shifting all of the data IN the partition to the left because once you change the offset of a partition (i.e. the byte at which that partition begins on the disk), you have to shift all the data to be in the same spot relative to that offset. Back in the Windows XP days, I'd wipe my machine every 9-12 months to fight the Windows half-life problem, but I never did that on Windows 7. I thought for sure I would when I was going to install Service Pack 1, but even that didn't create any noticeable problems when I did so in-place, and I used it for years without ever experiencing any of the half-life issues that XP had. I've never encountered corruption that forced me to wipe the OS, and as for viruses, well just be careful (mostly meaning be careful what you do on your computer, not necessarily install anti-virus). :thumbsup:

And if your system does become unbootable and you need to get data off of it because you haven't backed up, there's always trusty SATA to USB adapters (with an mSATA to SATA adapter if you're recovering the SSD). Or Linux Live CDs as you mention, but those may not work depending on the type of encryption you're running.

 

If brightness is a problem for you, go into Power Options and change the brightness setting for that power profile to something you like. I actually thought brightness remembers the setting you last used with that profile, so if you adjust it once to your liking while in that profile, you may not even have to change it manually in the profile options.

As for the screeching noise, people have mentioned it here. It happens with many units of many different laptop models that I've used (and that's a LOT), including my XPS 15. Mine does it occasionally but I almost never notice it because it's fairly quiet, and I imagine I'll be able to tune it out just like any other persistent white noise in one's environment. If it bugs me I'll wait until Dell has presumably made a motherboard rev or two and then use my warranty to get a replacement, but for now since people are still reporting issues on just-received units (though not everyone), I figure the chances of a replacement unit fixing the problem are uncertain at best.

 

I wonder if this screeching noise is actually something that could affect the hardware. I may take it into Dell tomorrow to take a quick look. Otherwise I'll just trudge along.

 

Judging by the number of laptops that exhibit some noise, I can't see it being a damage risk. My Precision M6300 has been around for six years and has made that same noise on occasion and I've never had an issue with it. Same with many other laptops I've encountered/supported.

 

worst experience ever with dell. ordered on nov 9th, expected ship date was dec 6. after waiting 3 weeks for the order, today its suddenly cancelled. i call up their cus service team and they claim i cancelled it. no ones willing to give me any further info. had no choice but to reorder, they claim it will be priority order and that ill find out tuesday about how long it will take. compensated me for a $100 only. i dont even know if they are going to keep the initial price i got when i ordered it bcz i had a discount coupon and the new prices are higher for the xps15...

 

Hello all,

I received my XPS 91whr model just yesterday and as usual wiped the machine with a copy of Windows 8.1 Pro. I downloaded all the drivers from dell and everything works except one annoying issue. After installing both the Intel HD Graphics and the nVidia Graphics drivers, I have lost control over the brightness settings. You can no longer push it to 100% brightness. And the brightness meter tops out at approx 40% goes down to 30% then 20% then 10% and then no more.

While shutting down the machine, the screen pushes to full brightness for a minute so we know its possible. Also reinstalling windows without drivers, keeps it at 100% brightness by default. The only temporary solution i've found is closing the lid then lifting again brings it back to 100%. But if you try to adjust it, you only have the 40,30,20,10% options.

Cheers!

 

Something with the windows power options were changed whem reinstalled. The is some kind of adaptive brightness which I disabled.

 

Sometimes after waking up from sleep the start screen resolution will change so that its very small and zoomed out. This also applies to a couple other windows on the screen.
I set my custom resolution to 166% and its great, besides some conflicting issues. Any suggestions?

 

Correct. Turn that off and you're good to go. Took me a while to find that too and I had the same irritation until I did. I don't mind adaptive brightness on my iPhone, but not my laptop.

 

Seems that no one is worried about the high temperature on the chassis of XPS15 reported by Notebookcheck.
Is it possible that any owner has noticed that?
Seems that high temp is only on bottom center (near to the monitor) just where CPU and GPU are placed.
The max temp is 64.6°C that it's very impressive, just for example the previous rMBP that is known to run very hot only reaches 50.1°C, perhaps this result is due to bottom made of carbon fiber, in fact carbon fiber has a high thermal conductivity so it acts as heat sink and could be useful if you have a cooling pad.

The picture is quite clear
Preview Dell XPS 15 (Late 2013) Notebook - Notebookcheck.com Tests

Dell in my country (Italy) is preparing the Cyber Monday that means 10% of discount on XPS and Inspiron products.
I have tried this coupon and it works -199€ from the price of top end configuration, so you can buy the top specs XPS15 for 1799€.

 

What size SSD would fit in here? There's currently this 512gb SSD on sale for $250 but it looks to be too thick. I'm trying to find specifications online but I don't see any for the XPS.

Newegg.com - Toshiba Q Series HDTS251XZSTA 512GB SATA III Internal Solid State Drive (SSD)

 

I played skyrim today with the laptop on my lap at FHD and mostly ultra high quality. It is the auto - optimization setting for that game as set by geforce experience. I was surprised at the frame rate and how smooth everything worked, very strong performance. Most importantly, I didn't have any issues with heat. I was wearing jeans with the Dell resting on my legs. It was warm, but in no way uncomfortable.

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I disagree. The touchpads on the MBPs are great. No one complains about those. This machine costs the same yet the touchpad sucks. It's not cool. The worst part is that it sucks compared to my 5 year old Dell Studio XPS 16. It's obviously a driver and/or driver tuning issue because if you play with the settings and use a different driver some aspects work better.

 

Unavoidable on this touchpad. I've used many others made from better materials and they don't suffer from this problem. No one should be making excuses for this laptop. Dell is charging Apple level dollars for a product with a lot of teething issues.

 

This is not true either. Alcohol is a solvent. This Dell has a rubber surface and Isopropyl alcohol can most certainly damage it. I've had rubbing alcohol damage the rubber seals on old film cameras before. Both ethanol and isopropyl alcohol can also damage some plastics depending on how prolonged of a use it is.

 

That 17.0.19 version must be new. I downloaded the Synaptics generic driver about two weeks ago when I first got the laptop. At that time, the website gave me version 16.3.15.1. I got mixed results with it (but better than the stock Dell driver).

I just grabbed the 17.0.19 version after reading your post tonight and I can say that the driver reports a successful installation but it does not copy over the Synaptics driver correctly.

I compared the INF files from the older (16.3.15.1) driver and the newer one (17.0.19) and I noticed that there are exclusions carved out in the new version of the driver for a bunch of Dell models including the Dell Testarossa (which I think is what the code name for this model was). Anyway, I tried editing the INF to remove the exclusions, and then the driver completely fails to install. In either case the Synaptics control panel never appears in the Mouse control panel.

There must be something incompatible with 17.0.19 and this touchpad.

 

Had the exact same problem. Thought I was missing something.


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I got mine heated up pretty good, it was dual booted into umbuntu at the time however. I was walking thru installation of magento,so there was tons of network and disk activity and I guess some computation as well.. It got hot right dead center, so I just took a break and within a few minutes it was fine. Maybe something to the heat sync theory

 

don't know if anyone has seen this

Apple MacBook Pro Retina vs. Dell XPS 15: Haswell review | Product Reviews Net

also does anyone know a way to turn off the touch screen which improves battery life? I very rarely if at all use it

 

sorry just realised the video is of the old XPS.... fail

 

Nevertheless, I would like to know how to switch off the touchscreen if it does help with the battery life!

 

Yesterday, I used my m3800 whole night, it's great. Compared with my the other XPS 15 9530, at least it has no noise and the touchscreen never die. As we know both of the configurations and most of the drivers are the same expect GPU, I have no idea why m3800 seems have better build quality
Will continue compare them.

 

From this link here Disable the touchscreen for a Windows 8 laptop? - Microsoft Community

It worked for me. Well, I don't have an xps but i guess all are similar.

 

I previously owned a MacBook Pro and that thing would almost burn my lap at how hot it got even during light gaming. This XPS comes NOWHERE near that level. I don't know if he got a faulty unit but my XPS 15 never exceeds warm and i wouldn't call any part of it hot to the touch.

 

To be fair, when i had a MBP the touchpad did discolor on me too. THough the pad is light grey in color it wasn't as noticeable.

 

Device Manager maybe, but I don't know if that would disable it on a hardware level or just make Windows essentially ignore it, so it may not save you any battery life. That said, I expected not to care at all about the touchscreen and have found that it's actually kind of cool, especially when using the Photo app in Metro. It might actually grow on you, and like I said this comes from someone who thought it was a total gimmick. Sometimes it's actually faster to click that way than move the cursor with the touchpad too.

But as we've seen, Windows seems to put the touchscreen to sleep when not in use (causing some people to have issues with it not waking back up when they want to use it), so I would imagine that's already happening for you if you don't use it. But if you disable it in Device Manager, Windows won't sleep it at all anymore, so unless a Device Manager disable actually shuts off the hardware (unlikely), that could actually COST you battery life.

 

Keep in mind that if you only have one sample of each laptop, drawing conclusions about build quality of one over the other is flawed. There are people with XPS 15s who are problem-free (myself included) and very few people have M3800s yet, so just because one M3800 is better than one XPS 15 doesn't mean there's a design difference. And even if there is a difference, it's entirely possible that it's due to Dell having already received revised versions of problematic parts and incorporated them into both models based on customer feedback, but since the XPS has been out longer there are more units with original rev parts, whereas the M3800 might have started production with newer stuff. But IF that's the case, warranty replacements on the XPS would get the newer parts too, as of course would new units manufactured more recently.

Like I said, I got to see both side-by-side and talk to a Dell product engineer who was on this project and he confirmed that they were identical except for GPU.

 

I've just received my mid range model, but i'm having a bit of a werid issue. Whenever I open a full screen game, and the resolution is set to 1920x1080, it only seems to take up 1/4 of the screen in the centre. this was happening since i got the laptop, but i've attempted to update the nvidia drivers, and this has not made a difference. Is there a setting that i'm missing somewhere to make it scale the 1080 to the full size of the screen ?

 

I noticed discoloration on mine having used it for maybe 5 hours -- one spot where I left-click and another where my index finger usually rests on it. I can only see it from certain angles based on lighting, but I admit I was surprised it happened this fast. Then again, if it happens THIS fast, I'm thinking it will actually even out in short order, at which point the color will be basically uniform across the touchpad and simply a bit darker than it was when brand new. I could totally live with that. And if it never evens out, other touchpads discolor too, and like I said I don't notice unless I look from an angle (and not straight down like I do when using it), so whatever.

Regardless, cleaning it seems futile if it discolors this fast. If it really bugs me maybe I'll request a warranty replacement long into my 3-year contract. Worst case I get a fresh start on a new touchpad, best case by then Dell has made a revision to the touchpad itself that reduces/prevents discoloration.