Problems? See this thread at archive.org.
EDIT: see bottom of the post in bold for latest
Following G0nzo's advice, I will make a separate thread regarding the battery life trouble I'm facing as it sounds like at least one other person has had the same problem.
The very short back story is that when I first got the laptop, the battery life seemed fine. I don't actually care that much about getting the absolute maximum so long as I am getting solid performance.
Since then, I have updated a few things on my computer. I have switched to the graphics driver 4627 and my Chrome issues were solved and I also updated my Nvidia driver. I had some audio issues but then switched to the latest Realtek driver that was added to Dell's driver page on April 20th and it's been okay.
Unfortunately, right now I seem to be getting literally 50% less battery time than many other users (4k edition). I can expect around 3:30 at the moment on a full charge and my battery wear is listed at 3.8% which doesn't make much sense as I'm usually just browsing and using the computer for light tasks. I have tried to monitoring memory via the task manager and generally Chrome is dominating the top list though MaxxAudio is consistently using around 60mb. I also checked my app usage stats which confirmed that around 80% of my usage is from Chrome (but in that list it just shows app usage so audio stuff isn't even listed).
All of a sudden, I see this post in the XPS 9560 thread:
It never occurred to me that the Audio driver could be responsible for the dramatic change in battery life. It's not 100% clear to be my issue but it makes a lot of sense given the above experience mirroring my own so well. That being said, I would like advice on where to go from here.
Do I just load this older Realtek driver from Dell's page and see what happens:
Version
Version 6.0.1.8037, A03
Category
Audio
Release date
17 Jan 2017
Last Updated
24 Jan 2017
Or should I do a system restore to a date before I made driver changes altogether and then just reload the graphics 4627 and nothing more? I would prefer to avoid having to reinstall Windows as I have many hours of setup that I have already done for some work stuff that takes an annoyingly long period of time to setup each time I am on a fresh Windows installation. If I have to, so be it, but right now my computer is working fine and everything is setup to my needs and I simply want to try to get the battery life close to where it was just a few weeks ago.
Where should I go from here?
Edit: My system restore only shows dates going back to April 19th? Is system restore not automatically on? I made all these changes before what appears to be my furthest back system restore date. This is quite surprising to me as I thought system restore was automatically creating restore points that would go back to the end of March when I started using the computer. Anyway, I guess that's not a good option now sadly.
EDIT 2: I have been filtering my task manager checks by memory usage rather than CPU usage. When I switch it to CPU usage, BY FAR, the number one hog of the CPU is listed as "Service Host: Local Service" and when I expand that, it says "Windows Audio" which is fluctuating around 15% usage of CPU. Does this mean I've found the issue? If so, what to do?
After some googling, it seemed like a good idea to just go to the device manager and uninstall and remove the Realtek driver. So I did it. Restarted, and the driver was just automatically reinstalled and the exact problem continues with Windows Audio using 17% of the CPU.
What about all the other audio drivers? There are two in the Audio Inputs and Outputs section(Microphone and Speakers/headhpones) and then two others in Sound, Video and Game Controllers (Intel Display Audio, Nvidia Virtual Audio Device, and the Realtek Audio). Should I uninstall all five of these drivers at one time and then restart? Would that cause problems?
XPS 9560 Bad Battery Life: Audio Driver or Something Else?
Discussion in 'Dell XPS and Studio XPS' started by insidemanpoker, Apr 25, 2017.
