xps15 Anyone have problems with the Dell XPS 15?

[seabastian]

TLDR

I honestly wanted to really like this laptop. Specs are great, build quality is great, huge fan of the replaceable battery, RAM, and SSD. Defiantly not a huge fan of all the stability issues it has. Has anyone else been experiencing similar issues with their XPS 9570 or similar devices here on the LTT forums? I noticed many people share the same complaints on reddit and Dell forums? 

 

I had my Dell XPS 9570 for about half a year now. I purchased it after hearing many YouTube reviewers and online sources raving about how good this laptop is. Having an i7-8750H, upgradable DDR4, upgradable M.2, dedicated GPU, incredible 4k display, all in a reasonable sized and well built chassis quite possibly makes the perfect laptop. But sadly I was not aware of the bad side of the 9570, mainly stability issues. 

 

I have been experiencing multiple daily random reboots (sometimes BSODs or just a black screen and reboot). Sometimes I would get up to five random reboots in a row. It would even randomly reboot when just sitting idle on the Windows desktop. It doesn't matter if it is on-battery or plugged-in. 

Event Viewer lists these sources when it happens: 

- volmgr

- Distributed COM

- Kernal-Boot

 

Sleep is absolute trash on this laptop. When I closed the lid putting the laptop to sleep at night, it would turn back on at 3AM with the fans at 100% and almost boiling to the touch. Had the same scenario happen twice in my backpack. Took it out of the backpack, fans 100%, so hot it might literally catch fire. Obviously because no airflow in the backpack. 

 

Sleep somewhat worked best when I disabled "Modern Standby" in the Registry. But then it completely broke again when Microsoft got rid of the disable "Modern Standby" Registry entry in Windows 10 v. 2004. I just gave up on using sleep and started using hibernation. Hibernation works better than using sleep but there are still some hiccups when using that. 

 

I had three cases where the laptop would simply just not turn on. Plugged in or un-plugged just simply would not turn on. The battery was about 50% charged according to the battery level indicator lights on the right side of the laptop. I had to open the laptop, disconnect and reconnect the battery to force reset it. Then it turned on. The first time this happened I was in away at school with no access to a decent Torx screwdriver to pop the bottom case open. I was stuck without a laptop for two days. Now I just carry a Torx screwdriver in my backpack because I expect the problem to return in the future. 

 

The Dell XPS was suppose to be the flagship Windows laptop and it better be given its price point. Back in 2018, I would be furious if I paid ~$2000 for a laptop that doesn't sleep and randomly reboots. I am giving up on it and probably going to sell it. Thinking of buying a ThinkPad T470 or T480 as a replacement for now. 

 

I have done a lot of troubleshooting all not fixing the problem: 

- Reinstalling Windows using Dell OEM Recovery Media

- Reinstalling Windows using Windows Media Creation Tool

- Using Dell drivers from website

- Letting Windows Updates install drivers on its own

- Using NVIDIA drivers from NVIDIA's website

- Using NVIDIA drivers from Dell's website

- Disabling C-States in BIOS

- Replacing RAM and SSD

- Reset BIOS and updated to latest revision

- Tried Ubuntu and Solus for a while (random shutdowns gone but still sleep issues) - unfortunately I cannot use Linux as I use the Adobe Suite along with some applications that are only on Windows 

 

All combinations still resulted in stability issues and sleep issues. 

[Roswell]

So there’s obviously hardware failure afoot. Short of running memtest to see if you have faulty memory and checking your SSD’s S.M.A.R.T. data to see if it’s failing there really isn’t much you can do.

 

Sounds like it’s time to send it in for warranty repair. If you’re out of warranty you’ll have to look into a full board swap.

[seabastian]

Same issues still occur with different SSD/RAM. I still have warranty but have not contacted Dell yet. I figured I would try to troubleshoot on my own before sending it in. But I am a little worried that they may not be able to do anything. According to some of the information I read online, many XPS users are experiencing the same thing and it has been a problem for several years with Dell attempting to fix it. 

[TriBeard]

As annoying as it is, I'd probably start off with a BIOS update and then a clean windows install. Don't install any drivers from Dell unless you have to (some fingerprint readers for example need a "trusted" driver only dell provides) and see if any of your issues go away. If not, time to contact dell for warranty support.