XPS 15 (Haswell) Owner's Lounge

Maybe 3 days with noise, 4 days without. Then the noise come back again?

 

I recently received the XPS-15 (9530) Base model and am very pleased thus far.

However, I do have a concern with the charging jack. Is it just me, or does the Charging Jack Connector on the cable feel really cheap? It just doesn't look like it is going to hold up for the long haul.

I've also noticed the connector partially moves our of the computer from the movement while using it on my lap.

I know I've yanked out the charging more than a few times on my old XPS-1640, and it held up like a champ, but not sure this one will.

So in my opinion, this is definitely a potential weak point on the New Dell XPS-15.

I wonder when Dell is going to follow Apple's lead with the Mag Safe charging connector, especially on these newer and thinner machines where there's no room for a larger and stronger jack connector.

 

Just got my xps 15 delivered today and wow I'm luving it
It was a pain in the to get Lightroom downloaded but got there in the end .
What a great bit of kit.!
Ordered 1-12-13 delivered 16-12-13

 

No I can right click, but like you said it's very narrow. Do you know how to do that mapping two finger click thing. I'ts very frustrating..... I can't believe Dell didn't test such things out.

I just tried plugging in a USB mouse.... it's on the max motion speed and it's still too slow. Anyway to increase the motion speed when it's on max?

 

MagSafe is patented, so never. Personally I would rather not have the added cost of a MagSafe connector. If you look at the Dell design they actually did a very smart design, and the power jack is separate from the motherboard. This is good because the power jack is typically a strong failure point for laptops (because it is plugged and unplugged so often). It wasn't uncommon for the solder joint to become damaged on the motherboard. With this separate design, if the jack gets damaged it is a simple 10-15$ part replacement and you are good to go.

 

The clickpad is really only one button. It distinguished left and right click by sensing where your finger is on the touchpad. They probably err on the side of choosing a left click if your finger is close to the middle. I think two finger right click is enabled by default on the Dell drivers (either that or it is an option in the Dell drivers). I tend to use the two finger right click, and the few times when I have had the normal right click fail I have noticed it is because my left hand palm was slightly resting on the touch pad and therefore throwing off the finger detection on the click.

As for the mouse speed, not much you can do. I suspect it is because mouse speed is tied to the resolution and because this is such a high dpi display the pointer speed is going to seem slower than you are used to.

 

I'm having trouble connecting my ColorMunki Display. The software keeps saying it is disconnected, even though I can see it in the Devices and Printers page. This should be the same colorimeter as the i1 Pro, which I know people have used successfully.

I've tried all the USB ports + 2 different hubs (1 powered, 1 not), and haven't had any success. Any chance someone got this working, and can give some advice?

 

Ok, on my Synaptics drivers (version 16.3.15.1) if you go into Control Panel > Mouse > Device Settings > Settings, select the Clicking option and then click the gear icon to the right. In there you can set actions for two-finger and three-finger clicks.

As for pointer speed, are you using the slider under just Control Panel > Mouse > Pointer Options? When I max that out, my external mouse (Logitech Performance MX) is so fast it's completely unusable. The touchpad in that setting isn't quite as bad but would still be a challenge for me to use. For what it's worth, I did NOT install the software for my Logitech mouse because I've found that having both touchpad and USB mouse software installed simultaneously can cause issues, and usually I'm more interested in customizing the touchpad, whereas the external mouse works just fine for my purposes without extra software. Maybe if you installed dedicated software for your external mouse that may be why it's not responding to the pointer speed slider? In that case I'd recommend uninstalling it unless it provides some critical function you need.

 

There is something wrong with USB ports of this notebook, many smartphone have issue connecting to XPS15, and seems even others devices.

Is there anyone that has had success to stop the charge of battery when battery level is 50% or others values lower than 100%?

 

Hey Ryan, do you know when your laptop was shipped ? Also, is this a US order ?

I ordered on 2nd Dec and it showing me a delayed delivery date of Jan 2 instead of Dec 17.

 

"Many" smartphones? I've seen one person reporting one case, though granted he's posted multiple times. The ColorMunki issue sounds like an app or driver issue since it was mentioned that it shows up in Devices and Printers. Please be careful jumping to sweeping generalizations like there being something wrong with the USB ports on this model.

 

There is even a specific thread:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/del...14-xps-9530-problem-connecting-phone-usb.html

So the phones in that thread are: Blackberry Z10, Galaxy S4, Nokia 920 (Bluetooth)
Interesting to note they have different OS and the issue involves even bluetooth connection.

 

The only other system the BB was tested on was a Win7 machine to confirm it worked elsewhere; another Win8.1 machine was never tested to rule out an OS/driver issue. The GS4 is tricky's issue (the one person I was referring to, hardly a basis for claiming a widespread USB port problem), and the Nokia owner says it connects fine over USB and only Bluetooth has issues, and that person hasn't tested any other Win8.1 machines either. So again, please be careful jumping to generalizations.

 

And now there is even a issue with another USB device a colorimeter this time.
tricky's GS4 was tested on others Windows 8.1 machines and it works fine (he have even bluetooth issue on XPS15 9530)
There are no reason to exclude BB Z10 from list of phones with issue just because its owner has only tested on a Windows 7 machine to verify that his BB Z10 works fine.
I do not see any reason to don't speak of this problem, every owner can check it and to report if his system is ok or not.
The problem might be XPS15 or Windows 8.1, but we have to investigate in order to understand and not deny the problem.

 

Yes, but again that could easily be an OS/driver/application issue, especially since as I mentioned (and the person with the colorimeter mentioned), the device actually appears in Devices and Printers.

Yes, and considering that Bluetooth and NFC don't work for him on his phone either, that suggests that his issues might not be the USB ports. And even if he DOES have a problem with the USB ports, it could easily be a defect with just his specific unit, not a problem with the USB ports on every unit of this model.

I'm not excluding it from the list, but if he hasn't tested it on another Windows 8.1 system, his problem could be due to an OS/driver/application issue, which means you shouldn't yet be using his issue to claim that there's a problem with this model's USB ports.

Talking about the problem is fine, but don't go claiming that there's a problem with the USB ports on this model in general when there isn't nearly enough information to support that claim.

Agreed, and until we understand it better, let's not jump to conclusions about the cause and say things like, "There is something wrong with the USB ports on this notebook", which is what you said. Before a claim like that can be made, other possible (and more likely) causes of the issues being reported would need to be ruled out. And that hasn't happened yet.

So yet again, please don't make a claim about hardware problems with the entire model unless you have enough information to support it. That leads to confusion and unnecessary anxiety among owners and prospective owners.

 

This is the laptop screen set at 1920 x 1080 with 100% scaling:


And this is the laptop screen at 3200 x 1800 with 200% scaling (notice the photoshop doesnt scale


Note the taskbar icons. You could definitely live with the display at FHD res, but you notice a massive difference when you go from FHD to QHD. Everything is so much sharper at QHD. If you want a better sense of what it is like, set your monitor to a resolution below native res (i.e for a 1920 x 1080 monitor, set it at 1600 x 900) and that's the sort of effect you get running FHD on the QHD panel.

 

Hey thanks for the feedback! And I had a play around with the scaling, it did work to a certain extent....but still not quite what I'm after. Thanks anyway! When I'm at the desk, I just use the external monitors (without using the laptop screen) and when I'm on the go and in at uni etc I just reset the scaling to 200% so it works alright on the laptop. Its working well for the moment, but fingers crossed for independent scaling for each monitor in the near future!

 

Yep, that's exactly what I do, although I use only 150% scaling when I'm using just the built-in panel because I like the extra real estate and that size is still usable for me (though only just). Individual sliders would definitely be an improvement, but it still won't be possible to optimize the actual drawing performance for both displays at the same time for reasons I've mentioned a few times already, so even if you get finer-grained controls over the draw size of various elements on the displays, it will still only look perfect on one display (or more precisely, one scale factor) with the other one having the expected size but not ideal sharpness. That's a technical limitation that I don't expect to be solved because it would be an enormous amount of work to solve a problem that will only exist for as long as people are simultaneously running displays with wildly different pixel densities. Once HiDPI desktop displays become more common, this whole problem will go away and all that will be left will be making sure apps scale well to HiDPI resolutions in general (though hopefully that will be solved long before 4K becomes common).

One thing that I WOULD like to see solved is removing the requirement to log off and back on for the a DPI scaling change to take full effect. Microsoft blogged about that saying that it's actually more difficult to do than one might think, and apparently one of the reasons it's not working well now is because the API notification to apps that a DPI scaling change has occurred was only introduced in 8.1, so most apps don't know to even pay attention to it, much less have any programming for how to deal with it (remember back in the Windows 95 days when you had to restart even after changing your resolution? That was true back then for the same reason.) That said, even certain elements of Windows itself don't adapt their scale factors correctly immediately after the change is applied, only working properly after a logoff, so it seems Microsoft has some work to do in their own software to handle that, just like they've got work to do with RDP to support scaling in general.

 

It was shipped on the 6th, but is a uk destination mid tier spec also
Hope your xps arrives soo

 

Is your UPS tracking link working? Mine got delayed but then shipped (just like yours) but the UPS link isn't working yet. Says "no information yet"

 

Same thing for me. 29/11, est. delivery 10/12, phoned helpdesk 9/12 -> sorry mate, major delay, email 11/12 -> delayed to 21/01.
Received invoice 16/12, according to order status, being 'in delivery' since 14/12. 17/12, still no sign of it @ UPS.

Dell must be trolling us

 

Someone has said, on an Italian forum, that the UPS tracking number will work only when the box will come in Europe and this will happen just 2 days before delivery.

Inviato dal mio GT-I9100 con Tapatalk 2

 

I can confirm this, it's what happened when I ordered the Inspiron 7537. In fact, it didn't show up on UPS' website until the very last day.

Meanwhile, my order's still on "Pre-Production" with an unchanged estimated elivery date of December 27th. Odd.

 

So how long does delivery actually take?

 

I like the connector on the Surface 2. More secure than MagSafe and stronger magnets. Though its a bit longer. I hope Dell does something like that moving forward. Having said that, this XPS connector is much smaller than my previous HP so I'm happy

 

Bah, just realized there is no fingerprint reader Best tool to quickly log into windows or "accept" an UAC prompt

 

Boys and Girls...my cell phone connectivity issue is no longer. Wait for it....wait for it....USB cable was the culprit, so far. Still no BT connectivity. But I wasnt eager to use that anyway. I tried three separate USB cables these past few weeks: 1 that came with my 1 year old phone, the samsung galaxy s4, 1 that came with my previous galaxy, the galaxy s2, and 1 a buddy of mine lent me. All 3 had the same issue of rapid connect/disconnect.

so back to best buy i went, after getting my hands on another S4 to see if it had same connection problem with my laptop...it did...so i thought then it was the PHONE that was the issue. so i went back to best buy for a 4th time in as many weeks. i told the SAMSUNG kiosk lady what the issue was...she connected my phone no problem to her laptop using my usb cord...then did same with my laptop, she saw the rapid connect/disconnect. she then pulled out a different USB cord, and it worked. i was able to connect my phone and my computer with this different usb.

so part of my issue is resolved. BT still unresolved...and i still have my replacement machine on its way. i still have the high pitched "buzz" going on...i will have 10 days to return my current machine..so i may use both side by side to see if one is defective moreso than the other before deciding which to send back.

a BIG BIG thank you to everyone helping to troubleshoot this issue...too many names to thank them all. but after trying 3 different USB cables, i didnt think that a 4th would be any different.

thanks again all.

 

Ok, so I have a quick favor to ask of any XPS 15/M3800 owner; those of you into cars and/or the (sadly) late Paul Walker should enjoy this test.

A while back I noticed a quick moment of audio corruption in one particular song when played back on this system; it didn't occur when using AirPlay to another device or when playing that same file anywhere else. I wrote it off as a driver bug in the initial release since it was so minor and moved on. But today I started watching this YouTube video of Paul Walker's car collection and got a weird squelch and persistent high-pitched tone starting about 2 seconds in, and then severe audio corruption (constant squelches, louder high-pitched tones, etc) roughly 30 seconds into the video when Matt Farrah says "Boss 302". I reproduced it several times at that spot and various other points throughout the clip (using both the built-in speakers and external speakers attached via the headphone jack) and also noticed that it started affecting ANY audio I played. Fwiw, I disabled the MaxxAudio "enhancements" in the Dell Audio applet in Control Panel.

Can anyone else try playing this clip to see whether their audio starts acting up? I'm trying to determine if this is a driver issue or hardware issue: Amazing Car Collection at AE Performance - YouTube

EDIT: I've since uninstalled and reinstalled the existing drivers, and also tried getting drivers directly from Realtek. In both cases, reinstallation seemed to fix the issue temporarily, but it ended up coming back after a while.

 

when i get home tonight i will give this a shot, i dont have my machine with me at work...its the least we can all do as you have always been so helpful!

 

must be some funky drivers...i experienced the same thing from my work desktop with 8.1 installed...

 

Really?? On a completely different system? I noticed that some of the glitches seem to be embedded into the video (the "pop" in the first second or two, for example, and toward the end there's a period where the mic guy messed up), but the major audio corruption starting around the words "Boss 302" definitely wasn't embedded. In fact when I paused the video, the loud high-pitched tone persisted for about a second and then faded out even though the actual audio from the video had stopped. Which specific issues did you hear when you viewed it?

I also just noticed that the song that originally clued me into this issue now seems to play correctly after uninstalling and reinstalling the audio drivers. I'll try it a few more times, but now I'm just curious from a technical standpoint what possibly could have changed between the first and second installs. It's the same driver version, and I don't remember any issues at all during the first installation that might have led to file corruption and such -- plus audio in games and everywhere else had been working for weeks on the original driver install, so it was just the combination of something in those two audio sources AND that particular install of that same driver version. Strange....

I actually hate when things just fix themselves; sure it's nice that the problem is gone, but if you can't account for WHY something that was previously broken is now fixed, you can't be sure that it's truly fixed.

 

I sure wish that Dell supported customization of this model.
Ideally, I'd want everything that the top tier model has, EXCEPT that I would want a FHD screen instead of the QHD one.
I don't have the patience nor the time to put up with scaling issues between various applications.
I need a laptop that is powerful, fast, with a 1080p display - is that too much to ask ?
I would take the lowest-tier model and upgrade the memory/hard drive, however Dell chose to cripple it with an i5 instead of the i7, and no dedicated graphics card.
Too bad.

 

The lowest-tier M3800 fits your need.

 

+1, good call! At least in the US, that spec gives you the i7, FHD, and the Quadro. You also get a Win7 Pro preinstall with a Win8.1 Pro license as well so you can easily choose which OS you want to run. You only get 8GB RAM and a 500GB hybrid hard drive (and thus the smaller battery, and apparently without even the 32GB cache....), but if you would've been upgrading all of that anyway, this looks like your animal.

 

I think the only thing that would stop me would be the price.
There is only around 265.00 difference between the top tier xps and the lowest tier m3800.
For value for my money, I would not pick the m3800, if I then had to upgrade the memory, hard drive (to mSATA), and battery.
It seems that Dell charges much more for it when they class it as a "business" pc versus a "home" pc.
I wish they just allowed us to choose the display we want - [in my case, the top tier xps with FHD display].

 

Your prices must be drastically different from the US, where the lowest-tier M3800 is $1799 and the top-tier XPS is $2349 (add another $100 to factor in the difference between Win 8.1 Core and Pro). Sadly I think the days of fully customizable PCs from mainstream, high-volume vendors are gone or about to be. Dell got started as a company with that concept and was one of the few top-tier retailers that ever offered it across their lineup and for practically every component. Lenovo followed suit for a little while but has since stopped or dramatically scaled down, and other vendors often had it as an option, but only alongside their much more strongly marketed pre-built offerings. What I've been told is that Dell systems are still built-to-order rather than pre-built and maintained in a large inventory, but reducing the number of configurations simplifies and streamlines manufacturing and reduces the number of incorrect order assemblies and thus the required rebuilds.

And to be fair, it does seem that Dell is passing the savings on to the customer; PCs in a given segment are cheaper than the equivalent PC in that segment was 5 years ago, even before adjusting for inflation. Higher-end Inspirons for example are a few hundred bucks cheaper, and the Precision M90 I bought way back when cost $5250 retail; today's equivalent M6800 tops out around half that much.

Of course Dell still offers customization through their business reps (for now, at any rate), but I think the retail policy change is just driven by market demands. While you and I like to customize every single component, the proliferation of smartphones and tablets has led most people to see PCs either as commodity items or items that can be done without entirely nowadays, and either of those perceptions requires that prices come down in order to keep products appealing, which in turn means the vendor has to take steps to reduce their own costs. There's also the point mentioned a while back that PCs' capabilities are now growing far faster than our needs (increasingly satisfied by smartphones and tablets) are increasing, which is leading people to keep PCs much longer than before. Obviously in some segments there will never be a PC that's fast enough, but 5 years ago, using a 5-year-old PC (10 years old counting from today) would be practically unthinkable even for a typical user's needs. But I JUST got rid of my Precision M6300 after more than 5 years of use -- and only because I'll be giving it to my parents. Had it not been for their unexpected need, I'd still be running it for at least another year because it was still meeting my performance needs all these years later once I installed an SSD into it. But consumers keeping their laptops for that long isn't good for vendors, so again, prices had to come down in order to entice people to upgrade.

I suppose you could argue that the people buying high-end laptops such as the XPS 15/M3800 may still really want the customization abilities and don't see PCs as commodities but rather as essential tools for their jobs, but I would also suppose that Dell considered that themselves, and judging by the lack of that option the data must have shown otherwise -- or all of those people have access to business reps to retain their customization options.

 

I got my XPS top tier today. And I have to admit, I basicly like everything about it. Screen is beautiful, typing is a pleasure, no coil whine here. Touch has never failed (knock on wood)...
Okay, Touchpad is not as good as MBP, you gotta admit that...

I ran a game today for 25min, and GPU/CPU load was very high, but the notebook stayed below 80°C GPU/CPU (find a picture attached)

The only thing I really dont get is:
If I play for example Heroes of Newerth... game goes into Fullscreen and I cant see the Mouse Pointer. Only if I uncheck "exclusive mode" which means, if I run it with less then the resolution I have on my desktop, it is windowed. I think this is related with Touchscreen. Anyone has a workaround?

 

Glad you like the system! That really doesn't sound like an issue with the touchscreen, though; the touchscreen appears to the system just as a USB input device and is therefore completely separate from the display pathway. And it definitely doesn't sound like a hardware problem with the display, which would be the only way I could imagine a touchscreen issue affecting the onscreen image. Have you gotten the latest NVIDIA drivers from NVIDIA's site rather than Dell's? Updated to the latest patch of that game?

I know that there's a bug affecting some games where if you play them on the built-in panel with the game resolution set below panel's native 3200x1800, the game displays with straight 1:1 scaling, i.e. you get black borders on all four sides rather than filling the panel. Given the hardware implementation of Optimus in this system it's tough to say whether that's an Intel or NVIDIA driver issue, but the Intel GPU drivers on Intel's site don't install on this system, and Dell hasn't provided newer Intel GPU drivers than the ones that were available at launch, so if the NVIDIA and game updates don't fix you up, your issue might be another bug along those lines, in which case you might have to wait a bit for Intel to catch up and then for Dell to release a compatible version of that updated driver.

 

hm hm hm strange. And no I didnt updated Nvidia drivers. I thought Dell advices to use only their drivers?!

And I forgot to attach the screenshot. So here we go:

 

Dell will always tell you to only use drivers they supply. And in some cases that's warranted, because sometimes Dell makes customizations to OEM drivers. Sometimes those customizations are for the better, sometimes not, and sometimes it doesn't matter because only the Dell-customized driver will work, as in the case of the Intel GPU. But other times it's just fine and often preferred by enthusiasts to install OEM reference drivers, since they often get updated more frequently and quickly, and sometimes the Dell versions have crapware that you don't get if you install the OEM version. I tend to run OEM drivers for my GPU, Wifi, and Bluetooth. On this particular machine I'm also running reference Synaptics drivers for the touchpad. One place where I generally DON'T advise using OEM drivers is audio because there are often manufacturer customizations to the audio outputs for that chip. For example, on Dell systems with docking station connectors, you generally need their audio drivers if you want to connect speakers to the docking station and have them work; the reference drivers don't use the docking station.

 

Go ahead and run the geforce experience updater. Have a look at the changelog. IIRC, the latest nvidia driver fixes a number of problems like the one you are experiencing. I don't recall them mentioning that game specifically, but there were some fixes mentioned. I am running the newest nvidia oem drivers and I'm having no issues with my system.

My driver version is 327.02.

You also may want to run auto-optimization on each of your games with geforce experience and see if that helps with any of your graphics issues.

 

Have you guys received your laptops on the day it was marked for estimated delivery? Or have they shipped out on that date and you guys have received it later

mine says:
Estimated Delivery Date: 18/12/2013

but it is not moved passed the "in production" phase.

 

Mine is still in production and is estimated to arrive on 12/20 with 3-5 business day shipping. I'm not holding my breath. If it helps, I ordered mine on 12/3 from Costco.

 

i came to this thread to browse about the same topic. my order, originally placed on 11/18, has been cancelled then reinstated with delivery for 12/17. today, saw it is now delayed until 1/2. anyone know if it's supply problems or due to problems stated in this thread?

 

With that late of an estimated delivery date you might be caught in the screen part shortage.

 

There is a shortage of the QHD screens.

 

similar thing happened to me, I placed my order on Nov 9th originally, it was cancelled by them with no apparent reason and after fighting with them it was placed again on Nov 30th with delivery date of Dec 18th. If what you say is true then probably tomorrow it will show up as delayed

 

Mine shipped on the 14th. The tracking number is showing an ETA for 19/12 however I not received a delivery notification. Also doesn't seem to be coming via UPS but Walsh Western.. must be a UK thing.

 

Update: mine now has an updated delivery date of 1/9/2014.

 

Mine got delayed to 20.01.2014 now.. Before it was 20.12.2013. But it is in production since Saturday, so this is already good.. Dell ordered on 03.12.2013 as priority order for me because it is a warranty replacement for an older notebook. They told me since Saturday they have QHD panels again but another shortage started (the guy on the phone didn't knew what kind of shortage).
I really hope they deliver soon.. Can't wait anymore.

Gesendet von meinem Nexus 7 mit Tapatalk 4