XPS 15 (Haswell) Owner's Lounge

calibratings still worth a shot, could say 90% when it's really only 60%, etc.
Alright good to know, noticed that KoB on Whirlpool was saying the same stuff as you, which would lend some reliability to it. Hopefully calibration fixes it, or there's something your missing, or you have a fault battery that can be replaced.

 

Naturally I will recharge to full when it runs down to hibernation, apparently this is in itself "calibrating" so long as you leave it to "rest" for a few hours. We'll soon know if that increases the battery life or not.

 

Charge it past full, and then leave it to rest and then restart, right?

 

yeah, with the thing off. that's according to the link.

 

Man, really really hoping that this is just a quirk and not indicative a true batter life on the XPS...
One of the reasons I bought one was because I thought it would have better battery life than Win8.1 on a rMBP!

What was the laptop you had before?
I've got a Studio XPS 1640 and battery life is awwwwful - 45 mins if I'm lucky

There was a section on the MacRumours forum (where the guy who posted all the info about the M3800 in the M3800 owners thread) where people were saying that Dell battery life estimates shown on sales and marketing material were never achievable, and that real life battery time was usually 50% of what was advertised (if I remember correctly).

What's your overall impression though (apart from battery life) - worth the outlay just from initial impressions?

 

It sure idles well. 8+ hours with 40% left if you shut the lid. Soon as you open it it falls to 5+, then 3+ hours. Maybe calibration will fix it.

 

If calibration doesn't fix it, then would be worth looking at whether a driver/BIOS fix would be needed - but pressure would need to be put on Dell to find out why a brand new machine straight out of the box doesn't get the promised battery life - still it's early days, the first thing Dell would ask is "did you charge it fully first" I'd imagine...
I see we get a 15 day return window in NZ, do you know what the window is in Aus?

 

If they are claiming to have 11 hours surfing the web, I don't know if that's reasonable (yet). Definitely possible if you have the unique ability to use a laptop without the lid being open/any external monitor and without any applications running in the desktop.

See here for some of my observations:
DELL XPS 15 Haswell 2013 - June/July? - Dell - Notebooks - Whirlpool Forums

Of course these are raw, I haven't attempted to fix the colours, mess with the scaling, or fully charge the battery from 5%/dead.

Not sure what "splendid" colour in mobility center means.

OS/Metro issues aside it is difficult to justify the expense when out of the box the colours and the screen looks close to my SXPS 1647's RGBLED, if a little sharper. But as a long term replacement, if I can get 5 years out of it then it will have been worth it, I like the weight and the 460GB SSD had to be a bit expensive.

Yes, that gives 1 hour+ life if you're looking at PDFs, light browsing, light Excel or Word use (mine was i5 dual core). This is definitely an improvement but ultrabooks out there have good life too.

 

Don't know what the window is but I don't plan to return it as I sold the 1647.

I will recharge from dead and hope for the best. Was never optimistic about huge battery life, if the regular small one doesn't perform too well on Dell performance machines, don't get your hopes up for a mere 91WHr.

Idling in the desktop after I left it for a while, showing 4 hours on 40% which is not bad, the question is how much it shows when you have internet switched on and you're running Excel, Chrome.

Maybe it is wonky out of the box but the thing about wonky is it that it has to be real world... it will actually turn off when the battery life says it will, even if this will jump around a bit.

 

i think the best true idea of battery life is the 3800 review as he actually used it from full charge and ran it down to shutdown. Believe he got 5 hours with the smaller battery

 

All laptops we have gotten from dell in the last 3 years have been from star track

Sent from my GT-I9505 using Tapatalk

 

Which probably is on the optimistic side of realistic expectation. All quad-core Haswell laptops that have been reviewed so far get lousy battery life as soon as CPU is not idling. It really is a trade-off between power and battery life -- relatively low power use under moderate usage is the biggest advantage of ULV CPUs. That being said, I am hoping that battery life can improve a bit if we use more aggressive power-saving scheme and (gasp) disable touchscreen -- later of which is known to be the huge power hog. I sure hope so, as I ordered the middle config -- note that even the "small" battery is anything but small; in fact, it is larger than batteries in many quad-core laptops.

 

I would say 5-6 hours is about right, if even a bit low. The MBPr 15" with virtually identical specs gets 9 hours in OSX, that is with I believe a 71WHr battery that is only about 15% larger. If you give OSX a 20% battery improvement over Windows that works out to about 6:10 battery runtime on the smaller battery. I think we should expect 6 hours from the small battery and 9 hours from the large battery. Anything less and something is wrong with the drivers that Dell needs to fix.

 

Bah - This is driving me nuts. Still no notification. Ordered on the first day....

 

Me too. I even have 2 day shipping. Really bad that the later orders get it first.

 

Yeah, I ordered online like 30 minutes after launch on the first day and I have overnight shipping. Still not shipped. California, US.

 

Same here. I'm on the East Coast. Ordered top-spec model on 10/20 with 2-day shipping. Still "In Production". Called Dell support yesterday and they promised that the orders are being shipped in first-come, first-server order....yeah, right.

 

Guys, chill!

Australia is a lot closer to China than the US is. Your laptops are probably on a boat headed to the US right now.

 

Its not that. Its that there are many people here in the US (in fact in the same city as me) that ordered up to 10 days after we did and they are getting priority. Maybe ordering first means your laptop is on the bottom of the pallet - but please - how many days does it take to scan all the laptops on all the pallets at fedex? Just a little frustrating. Certainly not being a first-adopter again.

 

I'm really on the fence about ordering the XPS 15, the m3800 or a Macbook Retina. Really interested in the battery life. You can't trust the estimated Battery life shown in the taskbar. If it can get > 3 hours gaming off the battery, I will be impressed. Want something for light gaming, and when not gaming giving more like 5-8 hours in more light-moderate usage.

 

It seems that Windows 8.1 is slightly worse on battery consumption than Windows 8:

AnandTech | Sony VAIO Pro 13 Battery Life with Windows 8.1: Largely Unchanged

 

Which in all honesty is troubling, since they claimed it was suppose to be more...

Not only that, but with the fact that MAC OSX gets such a much higher battery life makes me want to switch(used Windows since 3.1, with occasional bouts into Linux for work). They also do display scaling in a better way IMHO. I don't mind that it is 1920x1200 resolution..

Hmm feel like I am hijacking this thread now.... XPS 15 owners, got any more real life battery in yet?

 

Check the below box:


Then click on "Custom Sizing Options"


Then fill in any percentage you wish.

 

To be fair, Mac OSX and Windows 8.1 do display scaling nearly identical now. The difference is only that the Retina OSX has been around for awhile so it has better application support. 8.1 has all the hooks necessary for good hi-res display scaling now. It is simply a matter of developers properly supporting the displays now.

And as for OSX getting better battery life, it is mostly Apple getting better battery life and not OSX. Look at the Sony Pro 13, that laptop gets better power efficiency than the MacBook Air. So really the problem is that most Windows machine engineers don't know how to properly write drivers for power efficiency.

 

Ordered 10/18. Shipped yesterday and will be here tomorrow (11/7)

I'm in the midwest.

 

Mine is arriving on Friday (Melbourne, Australia) but thinking of returning it due to personal issue. Anyone know a Dell return policy? Do I have to pay for a restocking/shipping cost? If I do, might as well try to sell it or something

 

Well, if there is "only" a mSATA SSD there should be empty room in the case to add an additional SATA SSD (up to 1TB) yourself, if you don't mind to open the device ( see owners manual) .

 

Not, because the space of 2.5" bay is filled with battery in the version with 91Wh.

Inviato dal mio GT-I9100 con Tapatalk 2

 

Still no one from Canada's shipped?
And do you get an email when it ships?

 

No, the larger battery takes up the space inside the case that the 2.5" drive would usually go so with the 91w battery mSATA is the only drive option.

Edit: Ha... @[-Mac-] beat me to it!

 

Mine has shipped. I ordered it on 26/10/2013 in CANADA

 

Finally
Eta?
When'd it ship?
What spec?
You get an email?

 

Is that the doorbell?? Is that a Fedex truck? Oh yeah! its here ... will post back soon. Going to unbox it.

-Bernie

 

For that kind of battery life, you will need to disable touchscreen (hope doing so will actually stop sending power to it); it is not really a driver issue, but rather, the wisdom of having touchscreen in the first place (especially for the laptops with large screen). Samsung ATIV8/Series 7, the reigning champ of windows-based multimedia laptop with great battery life, lost 2 hours of light-use battery life (down from near 9 hours to 6:30 or so, I remember) when it gained touchscreen -- and its battery has the same size as the top trim XPS15. Now, this makes you wonder what the hell Intel was thinking when they made touchscreen mandatory on Ultrabooks, but this is the world we live in. MBP (wisely) omitted touchscreen (so far), so it can enjoy better battery life.

I do wish if they bundle software that allow to automatically turn off Bluetooth/Touchscreen/NFC while on battery power. I know Sony bundles the software to turn off Bluetooth (or, maybe they used to), and it was very nice.

 

As I said in this thread, the Sony Pro 13 (a touchscreen ultrabook) has better power efficiency than the MacBook Air. It is indeed very possible that this machine should get 6/9 hours of battery life, even with the touchscreen.

The Surface Pro 2 recently got a WiFi driver update that added up to 20% more battery life.

Drivers *do* matter a lot for power consumption on devices.

 

Yes, and I agree that the amount of battery life Vaio Pro gets from its (comparatively) small battery is pretty impressive. That being said, it is using ULV CPU (quad-core CPU is another power hog, especially on moderate load), and it is known that its iGPU performs far slower than its competitors, suggesting that they somehow found a way to underpower it to increase battery life (it makes sense for its intended purpose, though it is odd that they opted for the opposite (uTDP) with Vaio Duo). Given that XPS15 has QHD, I am not sure if this is a great idea for XPS15.

That being said, I agree that it is nice to have some of their tricks on their laptops -- for example, their "automatically turn off Bluetooth while on battery" feature is nice. Sony (used to) pack a lot of bloatwares, but they also add some very useful utilities. And they make great ultraportables, though it is clear they no longer care about multimedia laptops (I miss old Z, S, and F series) -- but it is going off topic here.

 

The samsung ATIV Book 9 lite also loses 2-3 hours with a touchscreen.

 

Mine just got shipped today to alberta, arriving tomorrow. Ordered on the first day.

 

I received my mid-tier XPS this morning, and so far I am loving it. Sat my coworker's new rMBP next to the XPS and compared screens for about an hour. Once I turned the brightness up a hair to match the rMBP, the screens looked pretty much identical during video playback. We were testing with a 2k resolution video recorded on a GoPro. The rMBP hickupped a couple times playing the video, while the XPS was smooth the whole time. The overall consensus with my coworkers is that the XPS screen does look slightly more crisp, and doesn't dim as much viewing from the side. To be honest though, I would be happy with either screen. So far I love this thing. I didn't think I would use the touchscreen, but am quickly getting used to having it! With the charge from the factory (I'm guessing about 80%), I got about 4 hours battery life before it gave me a warning at 10%. I would expect it to be around 5 hours (continuous usage), maybe 6. I was hoping for a little better than that, but that is much better than my HP's 2 hour life. I am blown away at how fast it boots with the hybrid drive. It is right around 8 seconds. The only thing I'm finding strange about this laptop so far is that it takes it almost a minute to shut down. The screen turns off, the fan continues to run, and the power button stays lit. I am guessing that it is cooling off? Overall I am very happy with the XPS, and am glad I purchased it.

 

It shipped yesterday, Friday is delivery. It was for the highest spec. I just checked online...

 

Caspertodd,

Did you get the usb to network dongle together with the XPS 15? Any other accessories in the box?

 

I've been using the XPS15 for about a couple of hours now. I have to say, initial impressions are excellent. The screen is amazing. I've tried out Netflix & HBO Go, both stream 1080p if you have the bandwidth. I've also tried a few other video services (aereo) and am very pleased with all aspects of the display; smoothness, viewing angles, and even the temp (I have the high end model and its running very cool to the touch, more so than my Dell XPS13z which is the lesser sibling to XPS 15 9530). With a combination of browsing, downloading software, watching videos, it appears as though I will get about between 6 and 7 hours off the larger battery. I've set the power scheme to DELL.

As for software, I am new to 8.1 and so far its "ok". Thought I would disable the metro interface asap, but the difference in browsing between the desktop chrome and the version of IE that comes with 8.1 is really apparent. I love chrome, but I am using IE at the moment as it has superior touch interface and scaling. I hope I can figure out how to improve the experience with Chrome.

The only thing that's bugging me so far is the track pad. On the XPS13z running windows 7, I can use finger gestures on the trackpad to scroll and zoom. Not so much on the XPS15. It occasionally starts to scroll, but then gets lost. Either its a setting I have yet to find or a trackpad driver bug (which by the way the XPS13z had in spades).

Still feeling my way around, but so far so good!

-Bernie

 

What can you say regarding to the reflection of both screens?
Does the rMBP or XPS reflect more/less?

What have you done during the time? Normal work, playing movies or mixed usage?
Do you have the 60Wh or 90Wh battery?

 

So I looked at the anandtech review here AnandTech | Sony VAIO Pro 13: Exceptionally Portable

The sony only wins in light.. in both medium and heavy it loses to the MBA in the normalized tests. Although that does show that in general windows can be battery efficient because it doesn't lose by much, it still shows that in heavy workloads OSX appears to be more efficient for some reason. If that MBA had Mavericks on it, it would not have won the light workload either.

Reviews are pointing to a 3 hour increase in battery life on MBAs on the light workloads in general. I just wish MACs were serviceable. If I bought a 2500 laptop, and couldn't change a thing on it, and something broke.. my wife would ream me.

 

Hey, can anyone tell me which edition of Windows 8 comes with the XPS 15? Pro, I hope? I'm creating a thumb drive installer in anticipation of arrival tomorrow. Got a 256gb Plextor msata patiently waiting to be turned into a boot drive.

 

Make sure your read properly what you are quoting. I did not mess up my address; the address on my order acknowledgement form is correct. Dell messed up at some point. I'm not making a huge deal. I don't know where you got that I needed to go meditate. I'm not screaming or anything; just stating the facts. No, "Its not the end of the world dude" but I ordering a $2K+ computer with a promised ship by date, is different than a $15 toy from eBay. They sold me a ship date which was before the date I needed this computer. Now, according to them, I will get it 11 days later than they said which is too late for me. In other words, if they cannot reliably honor the date they write on their site, they shouldn't write one.

 

So how larger and heavier is the bigger battery ??? can we get some pics ?
thanks!

 

How is the keyboard? Can you open the screen with only one hand without the bottom lifting also? Can you scroll windows like file explorer in desktop mode using the touch screen? Thanks!

 

Rep to you, Dourn. thank you for the detailed answer.
It's very good news that the larger battery doesn't add additional weight to the laptop. it makes me think about it more but I'll wait until some people get it first and maybe order it on black Friday sales (any idea what Dell is going to do for BF btw ?).
I am fine with one drive. what I am wondering about is the drive performance. apple is now using PCIe for its SSD's which makes for a very fast bus. how does mSata compares to that ?

 

I've heard you actually need two people to pry the screen open since Dell used super tight screws on the hinges