XPS 15 9550 4K - Battery Drainage is Brutal

The battery on this laptop gets nowhere close to the stated specs. In fact, I'm lucky if I ever get 4 hours on this thing. I unplugged my laptop this morning at around 6AM. It's now 7:13AM and it's showing 57% remaining or 1 hour and 32 minutes. What gives??

Google Chrome is at the top of the list in terms of battery consumption but that's to be expected since i use Salesforce.com for my business. Second app on the list for battery usage is MS Outlook at 5%. Google Chrome is showing a whopping 79%, but again, that's where I spend the vast majority of my time.

Regardless, there's just no excuse for such a terrible battery on a laptop this expensive. What are my options here? Could it be a faulty batter? Does the 9560 larger battery fit on the 9550?

I may end up changing my laptop altogether as a result. 4K display doesn't seem worth it to me, especially given that many apps still aren't DPI friendly and when using an external monitor that isn't 4K, you run into further DPI issues.

 

You probably also have the smaller 53Wh battery, instead of the larger 80-ish Wh battery.

We also don't know your brightness settings, keyboard backlight settings, etc. The screen brightness is what will have the largest impact on battery life for just about any laptop, since it is usually the most power-hungry component.

Between all of those assumptions, I could very easily see why you have under 4 hours of battery life. If battery life is seriously a concern for you, then stop using the XPS 15, and get something like a Dell XPS 13 with the matte 1080p display instead. When you look at laptops with 8+ hours of battery life, they are almost always 13.3" or smaller laptops. You never find laptops that have ridiculous battery life in a 15" screen size format, because of how much power it takes to feed a giant 15" display.


Sent from my SM-G935V using Tapatalk

 

I get 5 - 8 hours constant work use on mine. Do you have optimus enabled on the 9550? I'd definitely recommend the 9560 purely on battery life let alone many other things

 

I'm Running this Rig with Touch disabled for 9h - 10.5h on battery. I've got the larger Battery.

 

The 4k display is known to significantly worsen the battery drain. There are a lot more pixels to calculate and operate. I consciously avoided it for both that reason and the potential scaling problems. The big battery for the XPS15 9560 is reported to be compatible with the 9550 (but will only fit if you don't have a 2.5" storage drive).

However, I would suggest you first do some research to understand better what is most affecting the battery drain. Run software such as BatteryInfoView which shows the current discharge rate and see how it is changed by variables such as the display brightness and usage pattern. Having anything plugged into the USB-C port also adds, in my experience, about 3W to the power drain. Also check whether the Nvidia GPU is being used. If it is then use the Nvidia control panel to set the programs to use the Intel GPU.

John

 

You might get a bit better battery life with SpeedShift enabled (with EPP=255).

Why not try a different browser?

 

How do I write 1 to MSR 0x770 ? Apprently need to do this in order to enable Speedshift? There are a few plugins I use in Chrome not available in other browsers unfortunately.

 

Jagstyles,

See this guide. You can just use ThrottleStop to try SpeedShift. There are other methods to enable SpeedShift highlighted...

http://forum.notebookreview.com/threads/dell-xps-speed-shift.796891/

 

Check the battery wear level as well.