XPS 15 (Haswell) Owner's Lounge

Hello,

I am looknig for something to protect my laptop.
I read that :
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00BM8OG6I/ref=oh_details_o01_s00_i00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Fit perfectly but dont find it in France and i am looking for something thinner.

Do you have any clue what perfect fit this laptop ?

 

Doesn't that model have a smaller battery in order to create room for the 2.5" drive? Reduced battery life shouldn't be surprising there.

 

Hello,

I've just created an account to report that I have experienced the same, frustrating experience as two other members of this forum: BROKEN TOUCHSCREEN after a firmware update.

I've called Dell and after 1h of nonsense and me trying to explain that a firmware is not the same as a driver, they finally agreed to send an engineer with a screen replacement but they said that this part could get delayed...

Did anyone managed to get this sorted without a screen replacement?

Thanks

 

The brightness issue can be resolved under advanced settings of the power plan and disabling adaptative brightness (under display).

 

That's pretty consistent with what others are reporting for the version with the smaller battery. I thought about going for expansion as well, but I decided that if 1TB mSATA SSDs are already available, that's way more capacity than I need now on an internal drive, so I figured I didn't need two drive options. I also hate multiple internal volumes and there's no RAID support -- though even if there was, RAID 0 would double my risk and RAID 1 would cut my capacity in half. The only option that would keep risk constant and present unified storage would be JBOD, but then those two disks become inseparable, which isn't ideal either for recovery situations like attaching the disk to another system via a SATA-to-USB connector.

All 3 people who have reported a bricked touchscreen after the firmware update have required display replacements to resolve it, unfortunately. I'm really curious what's going on with that update since mine went flawlessly, but clearly that hasn't been the case all around.

 

I realize this is a long shot - but anyone out there with a top tier model looking for more disk space?

I would LOVE to trade out my small battery + hdd for a large battery (this would obviously include whatever necessary hardware there is to do the conversion on both sides) since it doesn't seem like we'll be able to purchase replacement batteries for a while.

Drop me a PM if you're interested! I would definitely prefer someone with positive eBay ratings or something similar for verification...

 

Thanks for replying jphughan. I wonder if I should attempt this firmware upgrade while the engineer is in my house(?). There is clearly something wrong with the update and, as I told the customer support guy, it's a shame they are wasting new panels for this.

 

Well, it worked for me.... not sure what else I can tell you. Having a repair tech there won't really help unless he happens to have a spare display for that system in case something goes wrong, but I can't imagine why he would.

I personally wonder if it's an issue with the updater code or perhaps a glitch with the firmware already on the display, in which case a revised updater won't do anything. As for the panel replacements, I imagine under the circumstances Dell is probably working with Synaptics for some way to unbrick the touchscreens on these units when they're returned to Dell, in which case the panels would be placed into the warranty replacement unit stock.

 

Are you getting that repeatedly? I noticed my first time on battery it seemed short by the meter, but it ran longer suggesting it just needed calibrating by running to empty and then recharging. After doing so, with mostly web browsing and office utility I get 5-ish hours. Obviously anything using the GPU or extensive CPU will drain it quicker.

If you've had the machine while and are still seeing that, look for background processes.

 

Oh okay, phew. I think once I replace the HDD with an SSD, the power usage will improve a little bit since HDDs tend to draw more power. And yeah, I cannot wait to get my SSDs and mSATA! It's going to be so much better after that.

Brenthaven is my favorite company for this kind of stuff. You should definitely go for that bag. It's good quality and they have a lifetime warranty on their products. What do you mean by thinner though? Anything thinner than that would be a laptop sleeve and not a bag. That bag is sort of an expanded sleeve, as they call it, being able to house more than just the laptop.

You said that you can't find it in France? Do you mean Amazon France? If they don't ship interntaionally on the US Amazon, try going directly to Brenthaven's site.

http://www.brenthaven.com/collins-collection/collins-sleeve-plus

Ah, that's good to hear. Was getting worried there for a sec. Yeah, I'm definitely replacing HDD since it adds unwanted weight and drains more power than an SSD; there's practically nothing NOT good about it.

Even though there isn't RAID, there's still all the reason to add an expanded mSATA along with the new SSD to keep the OS+programs on one volume and then the files on another. I'm generally not that picky about what kind of disk my files are on since I don't do a TON of file transferring, but it happens sometimes and I'm too much of a hardware geek to not get a 1TB EVO. I thought about adding a 480GB Crucial mSATA in addition. It's going to be overkill, but I love it. Hehe...

 

I'm one of the ones who had a bricked touchscreen. I was sent a full computer replacement. It took 2 weeks for the replacement.

 

Hey,

Is there anyone out there who has ordered their laptop in February and gotten a status order that is different than pre-production?

 

Since the XPS15 is super silent, is there any way to know if its running (when the laptop is on battery) while the lid is closed ? Some LED or smth ?

Thanks

 

Unfortunately no, moreover there isn't any LED that warns if it's sleeping while lid is open.

 

Nope, just coil whine.

I too wouldn't mind an LED to indicate that it's on, as well as a pulsing LED when it's asleep. Ideally that would have been visible even with the lid closed, but even setting the one up on the keyboard to pulse would be nice. I imagine it could be implemented in the BIOS, but I doubt Dell will make that change even as an additional option.

 

Dell could use the battery charge indicator, now these LEDs are always ON when PSU in connected.
This notebook is made to be used with lid open, if someone is using it with lid closed then he should know that is blocking the exit of air exhaust.

 

I wonder if problem of the Battery Charge Configuration also involves XPS 13 9333 or others new XPS systems as well as XPS15 9530 and Precision M3800.
I guess we should organize to report the issue of Battery Charge Configuration on Dell official forum, at least Dell will know the existence of this issue.

 

I have the 15 inch Macbook pro retina sleeve by Côte et Ciel (french company). Fits very snug, but I love it. If you want something that protect, but still leaves your laptop feeling ultra slim, I recommend it.
their website is coteetciel.com

 

I don't know if the battery charge indicators can get information about sleep state from the rest of the system. Usually those LEDs are tied directly to the microprocessor of the battery itself. I guess it could look at power draw and determine sleep/off state based on that and adjust its LEDs accordingly, but that would be more work and likely require working with the battery supplier.

I use my laptop closed almost constantly and have never even experienced throttling even during multi-hour gaming sessions, so ventilation with the lid closed doesn't seem to be an issue.

 

Sent my mid-tier for repair because of the noise. And 2 weeks passed, still nothing.

Called Dell yesterday and they said that this 'noise problem' is widely reported and because of this, they would not give me a swap. My only option is to either keep the machine until Dell has come to a solution or just get a refund.

Regarding how 'fast' they respond, I have no choice but go for a refund.

 

What exactly are you referring to here? I don't have my laptop yet but I'm curious if this is a function I'm hoping the XPS 15 has (ability to set max charge state).

 

I ordered the 2nd of feb, still in pre-production 18 days later!

 

May I ask which country were you in when you requested the warranty replacement? I'm in the UK and I feel like I had to tell the support guy what to do so now, with your information, I wonder why they opted for a full laptop replacement with you. Did you keep the old one during those two weeks ? Thanks.

 

I asked the Dell tech who came to replace my touchscreen and his answer was: "No, the designers sometimes are real idiots"

 

Well to be fair, investigating root cause of an issue (which doesn't happen until it's confirmed as a widespread problem) and then determining a fix and implementing it into production takes time -- just look at the Latitude E6430u cat urine small issue. The reason they won't give you a swap now is because given that you returned it over coil whine, if they haven't fixed that yet, there's a good chance a new one now will have the same issue, in which case you won't be happy with the replacement and they'll have shipped out two systems -- and likely have to ship a third later because you'll want to return the second. This is precisely why I'm simply keeping my system until I learn that a true fix has been developed, at which point I might call in about getting it fixed. By then it should be a documented issue with a clear fix, so they only question I'll have to answer for myself is whether it's worth risking a Dell tech messing up my system in the course of performing the repair. If you'd hung onto your system a bit, then you wouldn't be without a system and you could likely have gotten on-site service for the replacement component(s) in the future.

I agree that Dell took the minimalist look a bit too far in this regard (even Apple the king of minimalism has a status LED visible even with the lid closed), and I agree Dell has made some puzzling design choices in various systems over the years, but on this system in particular I think overall the designers did a pretty amazing job when you consider the amount of power in this form factor and the appearance overall. Just my 2 cents.

 

Sometimes it comes down to a cost thing as well. As much as a LED doesn't cost too much, when hitting a strict price point, it makes all of the difference. Also keep in mind, they were also balancing between simple design and not being too similar to Apple. Lawsuits are never fun. I also think the Dell Tech has zero understanding of the inner workings of product development at Dell.

 

same with me.
Ordered Feb 2, est delivery March 19th.

 

+1. The car I drive even during its model lifecycle went through some subtle cost-cutting production changes that irritated owners, like swapping out cupholders with a nice door covering them for a big exposed storage compartment, and switching from leather to vinyl sun visors. The cost savings on those parts couldn't have been that much on a per-car basis, but when the company is looking at selling huge quantities of their product, those savings add up for them. No idea if that's what happened here, but I wouldn't be surprised.

And Dell techs definitely don't know what goes on with product development at Dell since most (maybe these days all?) of them are third-party local independent contractors. The repair tech that came to fix another system of mine said his company also worked on Sony, Lenovo, and I think Samsung machines.

 

Had mine for 1 day and the trackpad stops responding 50% of the time it wakes from sleep, rapid starts disabled. drivers are up to date, does anyone have an idea ?

 

I'm referring to this:

 

yup, also ordered Feb. 2, but I managed to squeeze next day shipping out of the chat rep

 

When I got my replacement screen, the holdup was the hinge. I believe the hinge has been slightly redesigned since launch to give the exhaust ports some extra breathing room when the lid is closed. It sits just a little higher.

 

Hi, I have the same router as you and with the latest Intel drivers I get around 35MB/s read and 16MB/s write. 5GHz band with 80MHz bandwidth. I have noticed that the link speed reported by the network centre is somewhat off and lower than what it actually is. Use task manager and, under wireless, right click to see more options. I usually get between 433mbps and 866mbps (which is the theoretical max on 2x2 ac wifi). All the above is at a 3m distance from the router (sorry I can't test further as I live in a studio flat).

 

I can confirm that this made much of a difference. When switching to "Balanced" power plan, the gpu didn't lower its clock rates after some minutes of BF4. I also enabled the "Performance" setting for Intel HD graphics.

I can't really figure out why Dell would configure a power plan like this... -.-"

P.S: I also have the SSD model, but using the preinstalled Dell Win8.1, only with some bloat stuff removed.

 

Thanks for the post.
I also chatted with the Dell rep and got them to give me free next day shipping.

 

my trackpads not flush at the top, it bows in at the middle, is this normal as it seems a little odd?

 

That's what I thought you were referring to. Is that function confirmed to work properly with other users?

Order Feb 3rd, still in pre-production, ETA 3/18/2014. Hopefully not too much longer.

 

This function does not work for anyone on XPS15 9530 and Precision M3800.
That's the reason because I want to warn Dell on its official forum.

 

According to the chat rep I talked to, it seems my order is in production but nothing has changed as far as my status online. Any idea what's up?

 

Could someone please explain to me what the dell chat rep means by "pre-release configuration"? I am speaking with them about my order and all they say is I ordered a pre-release configuration. How can my configuration be pre-release when costco and microcenter have the exact same ones?

 

I blacklisted these modules, disabled bluetooth through the indicator, and installed Bumblebee with the Nvidia driver 331.38. However, I haven't seen any improvement at all in the battery usage. As per powertop, I am still using around 18.5W (the same as before all these steps).

Has anyone seen any difference in battery use with Bumblebee, or got the energy usage lower somehow? (maybe this grants a separate thread?)

Moreover, when using optirun I get lower framerates than without it, visual glitches, and crashes.

 

I have fixed 90% my noise and responsiveness issue. It looks like Firefox 28 (at least for Linux) has some issue that causes a severe delay, especially with smooth scroll enabled. Reverting back to Firefox 25 solved the issue. Almost all the latency and noise has dissapeared.

 

Note: I also tried installing TLP, but then the energy consumption was much higher, on the high 20s to 30W, so I uninstalled it.

 

I have the exact same question as you.

 

So here's my experience after a few weeks use: (mid-Tier version with 1TB EVO 840 SSD + Crucial M500 480GB mSata)

First impressions (you always remember the negatives):

• When I booted my laptop for the first time, I immediately swore the hell out of Dell because there clearly were 2 bright spots (halo's) on my screen.
• Further more I had a rather big particle of dust (taking up more or less 4 full pixels).
• When I moved the screen around a bit (to see if the piece of dust wouldn't fall) I also saw my screen loaded with pressure points (right in the middle about 1" sq, to the bottom right a 1-2 inch "line" and another pressure point around the dust particle).
• I also noticed that the screen (lid) did not firmly close. To such extent that the laptop opened up about 0.5" when fitting it hinge down in a laptop bag. It just didn't feel firm at all, it gave me a rather low quality impression.
• No coil whine whatsoever
• Very light, slick design. Love every surface of the laptop.

So not really off to a good start.
Nevertheless, I really wanted to start working on it so I figured I'd just get a screen replacement later...

First I did some standard Windows setting up. The amount of bloatware is kept to such a minimum, I really don't see the need to do a clean install of Windows 8.1. Don't fix what isn't broken
After that I did the following:

• disabled rapid storage and rapid start (and uninstalled)
• enabled AHCI for my mSata in the bios
• formatted the 32GB mSata drive
• transfered an image of the 1TB HDD to an evo 840 1TB SSD using the Samsung data migration software
• opened up my laptop and replaced the 32GB mSata with a Crucial M500 480GB and replaced the HDD by the Evo 840 1TB SSD
• closed the laptop again and everything worked like a charm

After all that, I started transferring all the data I had backed up on an external drive from my old MBP. Good god how nice it is having USB 3.0
Then I installed my usual programs such as; Lightroom, Adobe creative suite, Solidworks, Autocad, Steam (and some games),...

A lot (almost all) of the programs are not suited for use on a hidpi screen in Windows.
Lightroom does ok (though I'd like some in app scaling options). Adobe creative suite doesn't handle the resolution well, the toolbars and buttons are tiny but personally I can still work with it. Same goes for Solidworks and Autocad.
Steam upscales everything so the menu comes off all pixelated but frankly it's more usable that it would be if everything would have been tiny. All of the (few) games I have, run perfectly in 1080p (even though my Windows resolution is set to native. I'm not a hardcore gamer so no performance problems there.

After a week's use, I decided to give Dell a call about replacing my screen.
First time I called, they'd send me an email and I'd have to reply with some pictures about the faults in my screen. Never got an email.
I called again and I asked for the guy's email adress so I could send the pictures right away. He confirmed the faults and arranged for a screen replacement the next monday (it was Thursday).
I arranged for me to be in the office on monday so I could have my screen replaced there. In the morning I got a call from the Dell technician, saying the screen was backordered and he couldn't tell me when it would be available.... so I waited

A week later I got another call. The dispatcher told me that the next day, a technician would stop by for replacing my screen. And he did.

The new screen, what a HUGE difference. The hinge is much firmer now, it really gives a pro feeling to snapping the lid shut. The display itsself is gorgeous, no pressure points, no dust, no light spots.
I must say that in the beginning, everything was yellowish. I didn't really notice it until I sat down at home for some photo editing. A quick calibration with a spider express 2 did not really help. Since it was already late, I fugured I'd deal with it in the morning.

Then when I booted in the morning, all was fine, no yellowish tint anymore.
One other thing, I am absolutely sure that this new screen is from a different brand than the old one. The old one was A LOT brighter at maximum brightness (not that this one's too dark). Also this new screen feels much sturdier when touching the screen. When flexing the screen slightly, everything stays nice in place and there are no pressure points, where-as the previous one "pressure pointed" all over the place.

Safe to say, it was a difficult start, but I've grown to love and adore my new XPS 15.


Some other points I think worth mentioning:

Keyboard:
The keyboard is ok. Not really much better than my old MBP keyboard, not really worse. The keys could have some more travel. The keyboard backlighting is great, even though there's a huge amount of leak around the keys (which almost every laptop has)
I'm typing this review on a Latitude E5530 and this feels a lot better. The keys have more travel and it has a numpad on a body with more or less the same width as the XPS.

Palmrest/touchpad surface:
I love the rubbery texture. Sadly it does discolour pretty fast and it's almost impossible to clean properly.

Touchpad:
Works ok, but not much more. The gestures are as good as useless and you really have to make sure you keep only 1 finger on the touchpad at a time, otherwise it rarely does what you want it to do. I didn't really expect much from a Windows machine and most of the time I use a bluetooth mouse anyway.

Noise:
The first few weeks I did not notice any coil whine. After my screen replacement I clearly heard strong coil whine (which I could still hear while watching TV on a resonably high volume and under heavy workload with the fans on full). Since that time (1week ago), I haven't heard it again.
Under normal load (web browsing etc.) it doesn't make any noise. Under heavy load the fans spin up but the volume is still acceptable.

Performance:
This thing is fast, let there be no doubt about it. A cold boot takes about 15 seconds, and resuming from standby is just as fast as my old MBP with an SSD.
50% of the time, I'm editing photos on my laptop. Lightroom does a good job at full resolution, but I still notice a lot of lag on all of the sliders. I expected this to be a little smoother with all the horsepower underneith the bonnet but I guess the extreme resolution takes its toll. When exporting and converting pictures, this thing simply flies.

Speakers
For the size of this laptop, the speakers offer very decent quality. Don't expect to fill a living room with music if you have any respect for the music
Still I was happily surprised by the amount of bass they put out, I expected a far more tinny sound and it easily beats my 13" MBP.


Battery life:
The battery life's bad. I get 1.5-3.5 hours out of it depending on what I do. I knew it would be bad because of the small battery but I still hoped for a little more.

Overall quality and appearance:
Plainly put, it's the most beautifull, well built Windows laptop I've ever held in my hands. It's thin and light, yet very firm and solid to handle. Everyone who's seen my laptop has been awed, especially after I tell them it's got 1480GB's of SSD storage.
An LED for seeing wether i's on standby or shut down would have been nice though.



So I'm very happy I made the switch from MBP to XPS15. I don't have any regrets and I would make the same decision all over again. I love having this amount of storage and horsepower in such a slim package.

 

So you fix the noise by disabling GPU?

 

I am not sure what the change between Firefox 25 and 28 is, but whatever it was, it made a huge difference. It may be any of the following:

• Any issue with version 28 causing responsiveness issues, those issues also causing noise in the case of the XPS
• A better use of the acceleration in version 28 uncovering an issue in the XPS
• An enhanced or fixed smooth scrolling that causes the XPS iGPU to suffer

As of now, I've just frozen the package at version 25, hoping later versions will indeed fix this.

Note that I first tried disabling all the addons and plugins.

 

I have noticed something strange and disappointing today: The maximum resolution of the HDMI port is Full HD, while my monitor supports higher resolution (and it reaches that resolution with the display port). Is this supposed to be like this? Has anybody tried to get a higher resolution than FullHD from the HDMI port? Thanks.

 

This is incorrect. It's an HDMI 1.4 output, which means it will do 2560x1600 @ 60 Hz (and there's a picture and description of an M3800 doing exactly that from its HDMI port in the very first post of the M3800 Owner Review thread), and in fact the specs suggest it will even do 4K @ 30 Hz, though I haven't seen anybody confirm that via testing.

Unless you've successfully tested higher resolutions over HDMI on that display with another system, the limitation is with your display. The vast majority of displays capable of higher than Full HD resolution only accept that signal over dual-link DVI or DisplayPort because their HDMI inputs are of an earlier spec that doesn't support more than Full HD; maximum resolution per input is often indicated in the display's manual. Some much more recent displays are shipping with HDMI inputs that can accept the display's native resolution (assuming the user's system has an HDMI port capable of pushing it), but those displays are the minority at the moment. But of course, fortunately your laptop has a Mini-DisplayPort output for you to use with your display instead.

 

When your screen was swapped, Adaptive Brightness may have been turned back on and that will often cause it to appear dimmer.

Don't forget to install the touchscreen firmware update again.