XPS 15 (Haswell) Owner's Lounge

The hardware is mostly identical with the mid-tier and the top-tier, so battery life is easy to extrapolate. The top-tier has a 50% larger battery, therefore it gets 50% longer battery life than the mid tier. (Conversely the mid tier gets 66% of the battery life that the top tier gets). So if people are reporting between 6 and 9 hours on the top tier battery with light/everyday usage you can expect between 4-6 hours on the mid-tier. The only caveat to add is the mid tier uses a mechanical drive AND mSata drive so it actually has slightly higher power consumption, but drives aren't large power consumers so that would have only a minor effect on battery life.

My recommendation, unless you need more than 512GB of harddrive space in the laptop (and not on an external harddrive you carry with you) then get the top tier model. The extra battery is something you just can't make up for easily, and the cost of upgrading to the 512GB mSATA ($450 retail) for $200-300 more (Costco $1999, or Dell w/ haggling) is a good price. Only reason to get the mid tier in my opinion is if you need more hard drive space, or you simply can't afford the extra 2-300.

The biggest difference you will notice is that the M3800 comes with Windows 8.1 PRO which has support for business features like Domains.

 

Pro also allows you to RDP into your machine (way better than VNC for a whole bunch of reasons), which combined with the free Hamachi VPN app is a godsend, AND it allows you to create BitLocker and BitLocker To Go volumes. I'd previously been using TrueCrypt for encryption, but it doesn't support system disk encryption on UEFI systems with GPT disks, and its removable device encryption setup isn't nearly as elegant (though it is cross-platform, whereas BitLocker is Windows only).

RDP host and BitLocker were enough to justify the $95 Pro Pack upgrade I got from Newegg. Technically Pro has a lot more stuff as well, but they're features you'd either need a large workstation to notice (2 physical processor socket support and up to 512GB of RAM rather than Core's 192) or be a Metro app developer in an Active Directory environment (domain join, app sideloading with an additional product key, etc). Then there are features of Pro that are nice to have for geeks like me (Local Security Policy and Group Policy Management MMC snap-ins) but would never matter to regular people.

 

Hello Gents,

Short Version - Turn NFC&Bluetooth off for better battery if you haven't already.

Long Version

Apologies for going a bit off-topic (though I guess with the overall Thread title...maybe not), and apologies again if this is below your intellect, because like me you truly have to be a moron for this to happen, but I ordered the top spec laptop, mainly for the larger battery, it was slightly impulsive I must admit, and it was a fortune due to no discounts and UK pricing!

Anyway to the point, I've had the laptop for a while now and I won't lie, I was a little disappointed with the battery life. I have ravaged this thread, or at least did so until around page 100(ish), trying to find a reason for my woes. SOOOO, I underwent a revelation, my phone had pretty pathetic battery life today so I looked through all it's settings and realised I had NFC & bluetooth on. Eureka moment, looked through my laptop and realised I'd had NFC and bluetooth on for a good long while, which is the main reason my battery life was so miserable.

So my battery troubles are now over! According to my current indicator, and it varies all the time, I'm at 5 hours 6 minutes with 71% charge. Sooo, shall we say, roughly, 6.5 hours total? I'm not doing anything particularly labour intensive and my brightness at the lowest setting.

I also seem to have also lucked out with the lack of dead pixels, random noises, battery health problems and general screen issues. So I am very happy with my purchase!

Thanks for everyone on this Thread too, you were invaluable in my choice for this laptop and to fix the minor issues I have had, and they have been very minor indeed (apart from my moronic battery issue).

Anyway I made an account just for this post, so don't flame me with " You are stupid! Stop wasting peoples time!" comments ....I just realised...there may (even though it's a slim chance) be people out there as....challenged in the mind as me!

 

Funny, I did this just because I don't like having stuff running that I'm not using; I didn't expect it would make a massive difference in battery life. But since it took me a while to find where this was in Windows 8 (NFC has no utility app and the Bluetooth utility app doesn't seem to have a radio option), it's now in the Metro interface. Open the Charms bar (WinKey + C), then go to Settings > Change PC Settings > Network > Airplane Mode. There you can turn off radios you're not using (of course all of them will turn off when you enable Airplane Mode). Why Microsoft decided to put general usage radio management under the heading Airplane Mode I have no idea. Probably the same logic that drove them to make you click Start to shut down for so many years.

 

Cool, that's the gallery image that made me think there was an eject button. The button in question look like an upward pointing isosceles triangle with a rectangular bar under it. (It's to the right of the F12/FFWD key and to the left of the Insert/PrtScr key.) Is that the Airplane Mode button?

 

Whoa! What do you know, the gallery does indeed show an Eject button, and the function keys are mapped differently! I don't know if that photo is from a different regional spec (though none would have reason for an Eject key) or if it was taken from some earlier engineering prototype of this laptop before the keyboard had been customized for this specific model, but here is a photo of my actual XPS 15's keyboard (US-spec) for comparison. The wild color/brightness shift shown in the photo is purely due to my iPhone's flash, not at all indicative of how the keyboard looks in person.

Nice catch!!

Here's a text summary of the differences for those who can't see the photo. Compared to the XPS 15 stock photo on the website gallery, the ACTUAL keyboard on the XPS 15 differs in the following ways:

- The Eject key is removed; in its place is a PrintScr key that also doubles as a radio toggle switch (Airplane Mode in Win8).
- The Insert key is now purely an Insert key, not paired with PrintScr as the website suggests (since that has moved to the key to the left)
- The Battery Meter function key is gone, and instead there's a Search function key.
- The function keys themselves (brightness, volume, keyboard backlighting, etc) are rearranged among the F1-12 keys, but other than the above difference, the functions themselves are identical.

 

Is there a way to set on/off the single radio source WiFi/Bluetooth/NFC?
For example is there a way to keep Wi-Fi on while Bluetooth and NFC are off?

Inviato dal mio GT-I9100 con Tapatalk 2

 

I'm not sure I'm understanding your first question correctly, but Wifi, Bluetooth, and NFC don't come from a single radio; they're separate. But if you go to the Airplane Mode configuration area I described above, you can individually turn Wifi, Bluetooth, and NFC on or off. For example, I'm running now with only Wifi enabled. Regardless of what you set there, when you enable Airplane Mode, all 3 radios are disabled. Then when you turn Airplane Mode back off, only the radios that were enabled beforehand get re-enabled.

 

tricky, earnest question for you: Have you tried using Kies to connect your S4 to your XPS? I only ask because that appears to be the only 'approved' connection method that Samsung provides.

I have a Galaxy S4 as well. I just installed the latest version of Kies from Google Play, popped open a Chrome tab (desktop mode only, NOT Win 8.x mode!), typed in the IP address provided by the phone, installed the Java plugin. Bam, I had access to everything (files, settings, photos, even SMS) on my phone.

Perhaps not the answer you were looking for, but it works like a champ. Give it a try?

 

heres what i did, see the two items that are pushed out from the rest? bluetooth and the other is nfc.. just right click and disable.

 

Thanks for the directions to turn off/on Bluetooth and NFC. NFC will stay off for now, Bluetooth is used at work with keyboard. I put a new contact in my phone called Bluetooth and put the directions in Notes - easy to find!

 

I'm not sure that actually disables the radios; it could just make Windows ignore the device.

 

Phew! Glad to know that there isn't actually a disc eject button. Thanks a bunch for the keyboard photo jphughan!

 

After the mid-tier one has been released in my country, I'm having second thoughts about the laptop... I am starting to think 512 GB for everything may not be enough (Windows+Linux, maybe some VMs, plenty of source code, and an ever-growing collection of 20MP pictures).

What is the real size of the drive? (not "marketing" size, but in real GBs). Can anyone check how much does the OS need, and how much do the recovery partition(s) use?

 

I will do this tmrw for sure Kaborchers, and I will advise the group. But even if that works, I still would prefer to use USB for major file transfer. And it really grinds my gears that I walked up to a random Asus laptop in best buy and connected my phone via USB but can't with my xps. But thank you for the idea as I was avoiding Kies altogether.

 

Someone who still has their factory partition setup can answer about the size of the Dell recovery partitions (I remember there were 2 and I think they totaled around 20GB; in any case they should each be the same regardless of the size of the actual drive in a given person's unit), but I wiped my drive entirely and installed Windows from scratch. In that setup, my partition map is as follows:

300MB (Windows Recovery partition, required and automatically created)
99MB (EFI System Partition, required and automatically created)
460.42GB (OS Partition)
16GB (Intel Rapid Start hibernation partition created by shrinking the OS partition after installation, not required if you'd rather use this space for storage than Rapid Start. This would be 8GB on models that only have 8GB of RAM. The hibernation partition doesn't exist on the stock setup when it ships with 16GB of RAM because Dell doesn't officially support Rapid Start in that configuration, though it works fine.)

 

Thanks! And the real size of the drive? (i.e. 512 GB, or 500.000.000.000 bytes = 465 GB)

 

Diskpart says 476GB for the entire disk, which is pretty standard since all drive manufacturers use decimal-based gigabytes and Windows uses binary; Mac OS X used to use binary but they switched to decimal a couple years ago to cover up this discrepancy. SSDs also reserve some of their capacity as spare sectors just like hard drives, but I think SSDs keep more, though I can't remember if the hidden spare sectors are counted in the capacity rating. In any case, as SSD capacities increase, the disk I/O and thus the wear gets spread out over more cells anyway. That means a given cell shouldn't fail as quickly as it would if it was on a smaller SSD that was subjected to the same I/O load, which in turn means less capacity cordoned off as spares.

The 465GB would be what you'd see if this was a 500GB disk, not 512.

 

Is there a point to using Intel Rapid Start when the OS is installed on an SSD? I thought the intent of it was to put the hibernation file on a partition on an SSD when the OS is installed on an HDD? Are there other benefits than that? If not, it seems pointless on an SSD-only system. I'd rather just put the hibernation file on the main OS partition and have the flexibility of being able to shrink or delete the file if I want to free up space.

 

You don't need to do all those steps. Just swipe from right (or Win +C) then click the Network, then click on your Wifi, The Airplane Mode switch should be at the top

 

Yes, just turn on Airplane Mode and then turn Wifi on individually

 

Hi Guys,
hope somebody can help me,i have two questions reagrding the new XPS.

1. Which Symatec drivers you are using,the latest one the webpage wont install...any downloadlink maybe?

2. How can i set the HDMI to 120hz output?Im having a 3D Projector but im only able to set resolution to 60hz while using the HDMI ouptput.There is no way to have a good 3D Picture on 60hz.
Its the problem of the Intel Graphics but i just cant find anyway around it.

Thanks so much for your help!!

 

I respect individual choice, BUT I don't think so. Rapid Start is basically a hybrid of sleep/hibernate. I have a cheap 120Gb mSATA SSD (Mushkin) in my L521X, i'm running W8.1, not using EFI, and cold boot is ~5s, wakeup from hibernation about the same, and wakeup from sleep is about 2s. I can't see a meaningful change to that being provided by the intel driver layers and additional space usage.

 

What 3D projector do you have? If you aren't using HDMI 1.4b you might have issues with the HDMI connection and not the laptop. Additionally not all 3D projectors can even accept a 120Hz signal.

Also I beg to differ about no way to have 3D at 60Hz, Blu-ray 3d is at 1080p/24Hz, console 3d is at 720p/60Hz, and most people don't complain about those.

 

Thanks for the answer.The Projector is the Optoma HD131xe,Full HD .Benutze natuerlich 1.4a Kabel,der Projektor ist voll 3D Kompatibel.Das Problem ist mehr das ich nirgendswo 120 HZ als option auswaehlen kann.Intel HD Graphics Settings dont show 120hz and Nvidia Control Panel is limited to only 3D setings because of Optimus.Anyone having an idea whre to set in Windows HDMI Output to 120Hz (bei Full HD Aufloesung).

Thanks!!

 

Rapid Start is sort of a best of both worlds between sleep and hibernate. When you Sleep the system, it enters Rapid Start hibernate instead similar to the regular Windows function, but it wakes back up from it around the same time it takes to wake up from regular sleep, MUCH faster than resuming from hibernate. Windows has had a similar feature since Vista called hybrid sleep that does something similar, but that COPIES the RAM contents to the hibernation file (for data protection) and then sleeps. That gives you fast wakeup along with the protection of hibernation in case of a power loss, but it consumes more battery since the system stays asleep rather than off, which is why it's disabled by default on laptops and enabled on desktops.

And actually with Rapid Start you STILL need to keep the regular hibernation file on the OS partition since Windows 8.x uses it to speed up startup after a shut down (but not a restart). You can read about that if you search "Windows 8 Fast Boot"; it's a pretty cool feature. So yes Rapid Start is a bit wasteful on space, but I enjoy the functionality and at the moment I have storage capacity to spare. I expect that Rapid Start doesn't use the hibernation file because that would have required the OS to be awake to allow the system to interact with it properly (plus EFI systems can't read and write to NTFS volumes), and that requirement in turn might have slowed it down too much.

 

I'm aware that you can engage Airplane Mode there, but that doesn't let you permanently disable certain radios when you're NOT in Airplane Mode, which is what my steps do.

I suppose this could work if a) you're ok always being in Airplane Mode, and b) you only ever want Wifi. But for example someone who wanted only Wifi and BT or only Wifi and NFC wouldn't be able to achieve what you're talking about with this shortcut.

 

I assume you mean SYNAPTICS drivers for the touchpad, not Symantec. I downloaded version 16.3.15.1 a few weeks ago if you can still find that in an archive on their site (or anywhere else for that matter), but yes I've heard the newer revs don't install for whatever reason.

As for 120 Hz output, I don't have a way to test, but the HDMI port on here can push 2560x1600 at 60 Hz, which means HDMI 1.4, which means 1080p at 120 Hz is possible as well, at least from a bandwidth perspective. Driver support is another story, though. Have you tried just trying to enable 3D Mode in your playback app (PowerDVD?) and seeing whether the app changes to the required resolution and refresh rate for you? Otherwise you should probably Google around for something like "Intel HD Graphics 120 Hz" or "Intel HD Graphics stereoscopic 3D" for more information.

 

I see. Thank you for taking the time to elaborate (rep given) I'll have to try that out when I get my XPS 15 (ordered from Costco yesterday) since I use hibernation quite a bit. I'm on a domain with Direct Access so login from a fresh boot takes a while and hibernation speeds that up a lot. If it really resumes from hibernation as quickly as it wakes up from sleep, that would be awesome.

 

Thanks Mate,yes of course i mean Synaptics,messed both up ...just downloading your recommended driver version,this will hopefully fix the laggy Touchpad.

The GT750M def supports 120Hz at Full HD,but i think its the Intel HD which wont let me set it (yes driver issue)...will try Power DVD,using VLC Player at the moment since the Projector does the whole 3D rendering...May setting the application to 3D will do the trick to throw out 120hz

Thanks for your help so far!!!

 

Cool, good luck with the Synaptics drivers! Just remember to go in there and disable gestures you don't need to minimize your aggravation. The Edge Swipe gesture drove me nuts, but after I disabled it I've found the touchpad very reliable. I occasionally have right-clicks recognized as left-clicks, but I guess that's just a retraining issue that's part of getting used to any new hardware. This is also the first laptop I've owned with a touchpad that has integrated rather than dedicated buttons, so that's probably part of it as well.

Good luck with 120 Hz! I was about to say you could try forcing those apps to open using the NVIDIA GPU, but I don't think that will matter because if the NVIDIA GPU is only rendering images rather than handling output, it wouldn't matter what refresh rate it supports if the Intel chip didn't. I'm still betting there's a way. One other place you could look for more refresh options is Screen Resolution > Advanced Settings > Monitor. :thumbsup:

 

Cool! Yeah I admit I haven't compared Rapid Start to regular hibernate on this particular machine, but my previous machine with an SSD (granted a slower SSD) took a lot longer to exit hibernate than this does. I also added a bit more information for grins about the Windows hybrid boot back in the post you quoted (apparently after you quoted it), and here's the setup guide for Rapid Start on UEFI systems, by the way: http://download.intel.com/support/m...pid_start_technology_user_guide_for_uefi1.pdf. You can skip the BIOS part since Rapid Start configuration isn't possible in there on our systems, and for the partition size, you want 8193 for 8GB and 16385 for 16GB -- yes those are both 1MB higher than the real value, but in case my RAM has a spare byte or two, I wanted it to still work. You'll probably need to go into Computer Management > Disk Management to shrink the OS volume by that amount first, though.

The thing to keep in mind is that to enter Rapid Start hibernate, you have to choose SLEEP, not hibernate, the latter of which would trigger regular Windows hibernate. It would also be worth going into your Power Options and disabling hibernate after inactivity and hibernate on critical battery level, the latter of which can be set to Sleep.

 

if im not gaming, does the Nvidia graphics serve any purpose for me?

 

It would be better at handling very high-res video as well as productivity apps that can take advantage of GPU acceleration (Photoshop, Premiere, AutoCAD, etc), as well as anything that supports CUDA, which can use the GPU as a CPU for tasks where GPUs perform much faster than CPUs, such as media transcoding.

 

I'm pretty certain your projector is not compatible with 1080p 120hz video input signals. It is only HDMI 1.4a, and the 120Hz 1080p was not added to the spec until HDMI 1.4b. It is actually pretty rare to have a TV or Projector that supports 1080p 120hz input signals.

From the AVSForum thread on the projector I find people talking about 1080p/24Hz input being displayed by the projector at 144Hz refresh rate, and 720p/60Hz input being displayed by the projector at 120Hz refresh rate. I haven't found anything about 1080p/120Hz input.

 

Really appreciate your help.Touchpad is so much better now,gestures off

120Hz still seems to be a problem,Dell rep will have a look into it,but theres def no setting in windows,intel nor nvidia sw ... will see,guess we have to wait for driver updates.

BTW i have the same graphic-card throtteling issue,but its even more ridiculous with mine.Ultra Low Settings 1920x1080 resolution in most games bring down the nvidia mostly within 2 minutes.
Even mild using (Chrome 5 Tabs,open Skype) will start the fan and it hardly turns off... :-( They gonna change Motherboard and cooling unit this week...hopefully it will work afterwards!

 

thx! part of the reason i got this machine was to at some point edit a whole bunch (48 clips) of H.264 native video i have from a helmet cam i wore during a bicycle race. i can play back the video just fine on the machine...now i just need a "program for dummies" to go in and edit, or simply cut and paste, all the clips i want, add some music and text, and call it a day. ive tried windows live movie maker...and since im not familiar with editing, trimming, or whatever...its slow going due to steep learning curve.

thoughts are welcome

 

I just checked the user manual for your projector. The Laptop isn't the issue, your projector does not support 1080p 120Hz input signals. Look at page 60 for the compatibility list, you can do 1080p/60 or 720p/120.

EDIT: Link to user manual for your projector, http://optomausa.com/webresources/files/support/2265_HD131Xe_UM.pdf

 

Could you point me to their archive?

 

Thanks for the additional info! I decided to give it a go on my current laptop (Clevo P150EM with Samsung PM810 SSD) and it worked really well. Very quick resume and took a bit longer to RS sleep, as expected. I will probably only use regular hibernate now in cases when I will be away from my laptop for a while and want to force entry of my BitLocker password.

 

I don't even know whether one exists, but it seems rawbbk here took the version number I provided and found it somewhere. Maybe he can chime in?

 

which are the dimensions and the weight of the XPS 15 package?

 

For 120Hz: As far as I know it is only possible with displayport and dual-dvi. So you might wanna try this

 

HDMI 1.4b does support 120Hz at 1080p. Technically all HDMI 1.4 has the bandwidth to support it as well.

 

Still I haven't seen any screen/projector yet which would support 120Hz via HDMI. They all state "Displayport or Dual-DVI"

 

Costco.ca just started offering the Dell XPS.
Dell XPS 15 English Laptop, i7-4702HQ, 15.6-in. Touchscreen

It is on sale for 1999 (versus 2299 on the Dell.ca site).

I chatted with Dell online, and they told me the best price they could offer me was 100 off - or 2199.
I respectfully told them that I would have no choice but to purchase the computer from Costco - as I cannot imagine why I'd spend 200.00 (plus tax) more for the exact same product by getting it direct from Dell.

I would have thought they would match the price - but no dice.

 

As discussed in other parts of the thread, the difference is in the warranty. A Dell purchase gives you in-home service. A purchase from Costco will have you sending it in to a service center or sending it back if something goes wrong.

Either way, good luck with your purchase!

 

Synaptics Touchpad Modded Drivers (Haswell) Updated v02

This was originally posted on the XPS 12 thread, but given the same hardware in the XPS 15 (haswell), this hack/mod will work as well:

I was not happy with the two finger scroll coasting feature employed on the newest version of the Synaptics driver (v17). It was difficult to trigger the coasting and you had to do a big swipe in order to get it started and when it started going, it would slow down to a fixed scrolling speed (and skipped often) which made it useless for getting through large pages/documents.

Synaptics Version 15 driver was the last driver that was offered where the coasting feature triggered when you gave it a feather touch and if you gave it a feather touch, it would continue to coast at that slow speed for you. And if you gave it a fast swipe, it would continue to coast at the fast speed.

I wanted this awesome feature back! So I took the relevant DLL files from version 15 that employed the variable speed coasting and applied it to the current version mod. This touchpad is amazingly useful now and it's to the point where I am no longer contemplating on returning the laptop.

Here is the original walk-through that will help you get the drivers set up. Disregard the file link in the instructions and download the drivers using the link below:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u...ers installation walkthrough v01 11252013.pdf

I haven't had a chance to update the walk-through document to reflect the Coasting fix, but all steps are the same, except for the scroll speed. See below. The v02 drivers can be downloaded at:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u...th smooth coasting for XPS12 v02 12042013.zip

And the other change is that your two finger scroll speed should be set to the third notch. If you don't use firefox, you may want to try 2.5 notches instead. In Internet Explorer, the scroll can still be quite fast. I attached a screen shot for reference.
View attachment 105755

Enjoy

-djklmnop

 

If one buys the model with the small battery, you can always later just buy the big battery and an SSD (which will then be much cheaper), and volià. Can you? I haven't seen the battery listed as an accessory, but I guess Dell must sell them, right? (I wonder how much they'll cost)

On another note, given Intel's recommendation of moving away from mSATA to PCIe, I am not that sure that we'll see mSATA SSDs really growing bigger and cheaper.

 

Theoretically you should be able to buy the larger battery, but I haven't seen it up for sale as a part, and as you say, there's no telling what that would cost. As for PCIe SSDs, we'll see how that goes. At the moment there's no standard around that because the PCIe bus isn't designed to support storage, so right now all we have are proprietary controllers to make storage run on PCIe. But even when that comes along, all we've got in these particular systems are an mSATA connector and an M.2/NGFF connector. The latter has a PCIe connector, but using that would sacrifice Wifi and Bluetooth, plus there's no guarantee that any PCIe SSD standard would be backward compatible with any system that has PCIe slots; there might be motherboard support required for that as well.

I'm not worried. I think 6Gbps SATA is plenty fast for the foreseeable future, and I have no doubt that mSATA SSDs will continue to be developed and improved even if PCIe storage takes off. Look how long IDE drives hung around after SATA came along.