XPS 15 (L521X) Owner's Lounge

Maybe, you are in the wrong thread, this is only for L521X and you have a L502X, there are several thread about L502X.

 

Anyone else experiencing high idle and load temps on their L521X?

Idle: http://i.imgur.com/mYyhN.jpg

Load: http://i.imgur.com/5j30G.jpg

My fan is always really loud, that is my biggest concern. The laptop runs great, It just starts beeping once the temp hits 80°+ C. Also, my CPU never throttles. It's always at 2.1GHz. I've never seen 1.2GHz or 3.1GHz.

 

Sorry guys. I missed that.

 

I see on your photos that you have adobe Photoshop.
there is a program called adobe bridge update or something that activates the graphic card all the time, just put it on the integrated on the nvidia control panel, hope it helps.

 

I was told...

For short-term work-around,

I found user can disable IFFS(Intel Rapid Start Technology) in BIOS setting to avoid NV device yellow bang.



From what I have been told the new BIOS update should be made available very soon, as early as tomorrow perhaps. Please keep and eye open here and on the file library in support.dell.com for more information.

Information from...
Re: XPS 15 L521X ....Latest Problem - XPS Club Forum - XPS Club - Dell Community


Rick

 

Wish I knew about this before I replaced my motherboard. thanks though

 

No worries. I hope you get that issue sorted out.

 

Do Dell reps read this? Ever since I began griping, my tech support experience has tanked. New wireless card didn't fix the problem. They switched from the Intel 6235 to the "more stable" 6230. After 3 hours of the guy controlling my laptop and trying stuff, he tells me there are "no known issues" with this model and maybe I'm experiencing external WiFi interference. WTH!

 

are they going to do something about you no longer having Bluetooth?

 

Not done any official testing but I'm at 41% after about 2 hours 45 minutes...which is great.

 

The Dell technician came out to replace the monitor and the mouse pad. The screen STILL has grid issues and the mouse pad is more useless than it was previously. Although the technician himself was very professional and nice, he didn't install the mouse pad properly as it is now loose. The mouse pad isn't secured in and moves around when you click on it.

Having this Dell laptop has been nothing but an absolute nightmare and I want it noted on file that issues such as the ones many of us have been experiencing are seriously plaguing this 'top of the line system' (i.e. useless wi-fi, grid issues, synaptic mouse pad). There should be a refresh to this system and one that Dell doesn't screw up. My hope is that Dell DOES NOT release another product that it deems as its higher class line of notebook UNLESS they have fully tested it in the lab by their apparent "tiger" team.

 

I ended my experience last night with him scheduling a manager to call me today.

 

It seems that the L521x experience is going to end for you too .

 

Any idea why my desktop is a constant mess and my taskbar moves to the top of the screen when i open my lid after it having been closed?(laptop does not turn off when lid closed,i set it that way)

Also, why does my text line not display sometimes? ( the blinking bar with two lines when you click on a spot to start typing)

 

Got my xps15 last night. What a beautiful machine!!

However, the wifi is dreadful. I stripped out all of the adapter drivers and used the new driver posted on Dell's website (15.3 - I believe).

There was a marginal improvement. However, I then put the machine within a foot of my router and the wifi was perfect. More than 2 meters away, it was virtually unusable again, which pretty much proved that the NIC drivers were fine.

So, I spoke to a Dell technician, and yes it's a very well known problem. It appears that some of the posts on this forum are correct in that it is an issue with antenna placement behind the LCD. At this point in time, there is no ETA for a fix, and when ones DOES appear, it will mean complete disassembly of the laptop (screen removal and possible replacement) and a re-jigging of the internals.

Now, call me picky, but a laptop with no wifi is pointless. And a possible future fix which involves taking a £1200 laptop apart means that this design was simply not quality checked or field tested in any way. I mean, a laptop is meant to be mobile, right? So if I took it to a coffee shop or an airport and couldn't get a wifi signal, what's the point?

I'm surprised that Dell even ship these units knowing that this problem exists, and is so fundamental to a supposedly portable device.

Issuing a dongle to customers is almost a joke.

Basically, drivers will NEVER fix this problem. It's caused by the antenna being shielded by the case behind the LCD.

I have sent mine back and am rather disappointed. I'm looking at alternatives now, but the specs of the XPS 15 are pretty hard to match in such a nice case!

I'm a little surprised that every XPS 15 owner isn't having some kind of WiFi issue. I would have expected them all to have been the same.

Anyone got any ideas? Something with an i7 CPU and a decent GPU would be nice...(not Apple, please!)

Actually, scratch that last question. I've just read about the upcoming ASUS ZenBook U500. Now that DOES look very nice!!

 

that's because not ever machine is affected. If they all were then the fix/solution would have been easier to identify.

My wifi is perfect and I even took it to my job where our corporate wifi is about 100 feet from my desk and I was able to pull in 20MBps which is what I expected.

 

Oh wow. Now that is surprising! I wonder what the difference is with the working ones and the non working ones then?
I was sure it was an inherent design flaw in the antenna placement (going on what the Tech told me, and what I have read on forums)

Odd

 

"assembly precision" is my guess...just because Engineering makes it work right and gets the design commercialized does not mean that the factory floor gets it 100% correct 100% of the time.

For us customers, that means "luck of the draw."

ick.

old issue though...as in dating from the time the laptop first appeared in consumer hands this past summer (late spring?).

 

Its so sad the problems with xps 15 L521x, i love the design, but i wont spend my money in a nice laptop that dont works properly.

....

I hope that the future laptops of this reference have the problem resolved (antenna in correct place, no problem of gpu or cpu throttling, no overheat)

 

Yes it does the trick I disabled the Intel Rapid Start Technology in the bios and my NV card is back up and running thanks for the help

Now what does Intel Rapid Start Technology do?

 

The big part of it is that iRST utilizes a special partition on the SSD to replace the 'hibernate' function of Windows. This hibernation partition must match system RAM size.

Basically, once your machine has been sleeping long enough (configurable) the iRST support drops the memory image into that hibernation partition, and then completely powers off the machine.

This completely replaces the Windows hibernation mode.

On power-up, the memory image is loaded from the SSD (in this case over the the SATA3 connection) and the system is brought out of sleep mode.

I haven't seen any technical documentation on it, but it seems like Intel has billed the marketing such that the sub-10-second restart works only for 8 Gb RAM systems (or less, implied, but who has that on a modern machine). In practice, it works fine on my 16 Gb ram machine, and is easily faster than coming out of Windows based hibernation - with the hibernation file on the system HDD.

There may be a small performance loss for me, having reduced my SSD caching of my system HDD from 24 to 16 Gb, but it hasn't been enough to care about. I find a good deal on a 64 Gb mSATA SDD that is as-good-or-better than the Samsung in the machine now I may upgrade it, but I'm in no hurry.

related: the Intel Smart Connect will basically momentarily awaken the system that is sleeping to allow web-apps, etc., to update. I'm guessing this is at least part of the cause of what a bunch of people complain about here that the DVD-ROM is accessed while the system is sleeping - every time iSCT brings the system up to touch the network I'd bet the DVD gets accessed.

 

Spoke to manager. He said they are aware of the problem and have been working with intel to solve it. He states it is a common problem with this particular intel chipset. Within 2-3 weeks he expects a new chipset driver from intel and BIOS. Then they have to test it. Just relaying what they said.

I know a couple of people who have not had problems had the i5. Maybe I'll see if I can make a poll on here to see if there is a common configuration to all the problem machines.

My touchpad was replaced today. Only tested it for a very short time, but I think it may have fixed my issues.

 

I have the i5 and I have the issue. On my first machine the screen was replaced twice,wireless card 3 times,motherboard,15 calls to tech support and still no go. so they sent me a new machine and has the same issue. im going to say it has nothing to do with what processor option you have.

 

This actually WORKS!!! :hi2:

 

Just tried it. I does work!

 

Works for what ? What's it fix ?

 

You have a 16GB laptop but you only gave 8GB of your SSD to iRST?

 

No, 16 gb ram, 16 gb of ssd as hibernation partition for rapid start, 16 gb of ssd for caching.


Sent from my brain using neurons fueled by glucose

 

After the horrible (for me) A09 Bios, the fan kept spinning extremely high all the time, the battery dropped from 6 to 3 hours, and GeForce 640M wasn't recognized by the system (yellow flag in device manager).

So I went to BIOS setup, disabled Intel Rapid Start Technology, and all the above got fixed. GeForce works, the fan is silent, the battery lasts for 6 hours! :thumbsup:

 

Hi Folks,
It's my first post here, but i'm using l521x for almost two months. It was bought directly from Polish Dell Shop. I have newest version of bios, drivers and windows 8 enterprise from msdn (earlier original installed win7). But off course i've got problems with WiFi. After everything what i can do, i've called to dell support and today dell serviceman was in my office and he replaced wifi card and display (cause antenna is inside it). After his work nothing is changed
So dell has a problem. He told me something like "this laptop has 'to be a new' syndrome" and he was sure that dell is going to fix it. He also told that maybe replacing a motherboard will fix a problem, but he was not sure about it.
So i've got new display and wifi card and i'm still waiting for a miracle...
Greets!

 

eswuer, have you made sure that the "Power Saving Mode" under "Wireless Adapter Settings" in the Battery/Power Options is set to "Maximum Performance" for battery and plugged in?

I've been to 2 different locations using wireless now and have not had an issue and I am a good distance from the router.

I even played a good 30 minutes or more of Counter Strike: Global Offensive using a wireless connection and had a consistent ping of 70.

 

I have talked at length to Dell customer support and have been assured that the wireless card hardware was changed on the 12th of September and that they are aware of and have fixed the CPU throttling issues.
They said any ordered now would have the new hardware.
Am about to order the full SSD version (Does anyone know what SSD it is? - I am hoping it is the Samsung 830)
When I receive it I will test it as comprehensibly as I can during the seven day evaluation period and see if all is well, I will post my findings here!

Fingers crossed....

 

It is in fact the Samsung 830!! This configuration with Windows 8 on A09 and UEFI boot, takes 8 seconds to boot and 10 seconds to Firefox for me...this laptop is a beast

 

Any problems?

EDIT:
Reading further back I see you said the WiFi is fine, sorry should have seen that.
Have you noticed any throttling on the CPU? (More than might be expected anyhow)
When did you by you XPS - was it after 12th September?

 

Good luck to you Callos, I hope it bears out.

 

I bought it July 29th...and no throttling for me as I don't play for extended periods. Nothing on the laptop gets hot...some parts get warm like the bottom steel plate but not anything I will describe as hot. Unlike my previous MacBook Pro 2011 or Dell XPS 1530 which can both be used to fry eggs on lol

 

If your assessment is true. I really wonder how Dell is going to manage the fix with us, the owners of the defective units. This raises some questions:

• Will Dell output an official statement about they have fixed the wifi issue
• If yes, how are we (the already owners) going to be warned about the fix availability
• How will Dell manage the retrofit of the already sold defective units

I'm really interested in getting the Dell statement about this, but I've the bad feeling there is no more Dell fellow on this forum.

 

fortunately they have admitted this on the Reviews page for this system on dell.com. They even said that if/when a fix is announced they would update their response to the negative review it was posted on.

 

Ok let's wait and hope to see the fix before the L531X release !

 

Yeah Man. All on max. As i wrote, I did everything I cloud.

 

Yeah Man. All on max. As i wrote, I did everything I cloud.

 

Cool! So i will wait until new stuff will arrive to Dell Poland. Here they didn't hear about problems with wifi in l521x.
Thx!

 

I feel I should say that although I was told this - and asked for confirmation several times - I did not get it from engineers first hand.
I was talking to sales reps who "escalated" the issue to technical staff. Despite trying several times I was not able to talk to any of them directly.
It is probable they work under a different system.
However, quoting as best I can they said "There had been a wireless issue but it had been solved, and that a solution was in place from the 12th of September."
They were not clear on how it had been solved - but mentioned a "whole new wireless card".
They answered my questions about CPU throttling with less clarity but said it was no longer an issue.
If someone could confirm this independently, that would probably be helpful.

I hope this helps!

 

Do you know where I can disable smart connect?

 

I haven't played with it myself, but the GUI control that Intel provides seems to be the way to do it.

Intel® Smart Connect Technology — Basic and advanced settings

 

Ok, first post and have been following this from the beginning. I guess I have waiting for some good news to purchase - and I just put in my order. Wish me luck, and if it has the wireless issue - it is going right back.

Anyway, I have been sitting on a Samsung 830 for a few months (planned to purchase this earlier) so I plan to replace the 750 GB factory with the SSD. Can I just go in and replace the hard drive like I have in the past? Or will I need to remove the mSata and load the Intel Rapid software? My plan is to start fresh with a clean install. Any help is greatly appreciated!! For the record, now I can't wait for the Samsung 840 Pro!!

Finally, (hoping this works for me) thanks to everyone that has posted and provided me with incredibly valuable information for this purchase. I like the quality but the headaches are not worth my time. So good luck to everyone still trying to get their systems updated/exchanged/drivered and anything else that Dell should do!!

 

can you update us with on your WIFI status? to figure out if they really fixed it on sept 12th.

thanks

 

Well I figured out installing Win 7 and Rapid Start. My only question is, does RST go into effect for things like closing the lid? Under power options it stills shows the normal options (do nothing, sleep, hibernate, shut down). I thought it somehow disabled Windows hibernate. So what happens when selecting sleep or hibernate in the Windows power options menu? Under the RST GUI it only shows critical battery and timer. Is that all it is used for?

 

I fixed my WiFi situation!



Just a joke Dell. I know we are all counting on you to provide a real solution soon.

 

RST only applies in Sleep, you should disable Windows Hibernation support altogether and just set your button/lid events to put your machine to sleep. RST does not wire in new events into Windows.

You also need to have a properly configuration hibernation partition on the mSATA SSD. That took me a couple tries to get correct after I upgraded to 16 Gb of RAM from the stock 8 Gb.

It's possible that if Hibernation is still enabled that RST won't give you full control, I don't know.