[SOLVED] Impossible discharge rate on XPS 9500

[James Fin]

Hey everyone!

 

I've been using my XPS for about 6 months now and for about a week nowy i've been getting abysmal battery performance. Attached you can see that, at idle, i'm discharging at 40 watts! I've seen it never below 20 watts and as high as 60 watts. At. Idle. I've tried both the windows power plan and dell's power plan. Also, the discharge rate does not change when I switch from "better battery" to "power saving" in the power mode. How tf is that possible.

 

I'm quite disturbed, seeing that other people get about 2 - 4 watts at idle. I've already done a golden image driver install of all drivers, i've updated windows to the newest I can, I deactivated my dGPU and I uninstalled my secondary ssd that I upgraded the laptop with, to no avail.

 

I wanted to check in with all of you to see if someone has anything I could do. Last thing i can think of is a golden image OS install, else I will let hell loose with dell support. Cause an 86 wHr battery lasting for literally 30 mins is... Unnacceptable.

 

Thanks in advance for your help!

[Chris Pratt]

Idle doesn't always mean idle, especially with prebuilts and the crapware that's normally installed on them. Go into your Windows Battery settings, and there's a link there to see usage by app. See if there's anything that stands out there.

[Kilrah]

Check task manager to see if some crashing program is using CPU or GPU. Tends to happen quite often on my Dell...

[James Fin]

9 minutes ago, Chris Pratt said:

Idle doesn't always mean idle, especially with prebuilts and the crapware that's normally installed on them. Go into your Windows Battery settings, and there's a link there to see usage by app. See if there's anything that stands out there.

Hey, thanks for your response! Looked at that, in my case it would be "teams" over the last 48 hours. As i disabled it at startup, it's not running when I had this idle temp. I also tried disabling literally everything I could in the startup menu in task manager. I am at a loss...

[James Fin]

5 minutes ago, Kilrah said:

Check task manager to see if some crashing program is using CPU or GPU. Tends to happen quite often on my Dell...

Highest power usage is system.exe... kinda sounds like a driver issue, doesn't that? How is that possible when I literally installed all drivers from scratch via dells official webpage?

[Chris Pratt]

19 minutes ago, James Fin said:

Highest power usage is system.exe... kinda sounds like a driver issue, doesn't that? How is that possible when I literally installed all drivers from scratch via dells official webpage?

It's not exactly unheard of for Dell to have crappy drivers. Have you tried searching for any similar issues online? It would be helpful to know if it's isolated to you or part of a larger issue, affecting multiple people.

 

So, there does seem to be a large number of complaints about battery discharging way too quickly on this model, but unfortunately, it's very light on solutions. The best I've seen is making sure integrated graphics is set as preferred in the global 3D settings of the Nivida control panel, and making sure Windows is fully up to date. Seems for some at least, the dGPU is on even when not actively being used, and there may be an issue in a particular Windows revision that contributes to the issue.

 

However, given that there's so many reports of nearly exactly the same behavior. This may be endemic to this model. It very well might be worth pursuing an RMA with Dell.

[James Fin]

6 hours ago, Chris Pratt said:

It's not exactly unheard of for Dell to have crappy drivers. Have you tried searching for any similar issues online? It would be helpful to know if it's isolated to you or part of a larger issue, affecting multiple people.

 

So, there does seem to be a large number of complaints about battery discharging way too quickly on this model, but unfortunately, it's very light on solutions. The best I've seen is making sure integrated graphics is set as preferred in the global 3D settings of the Nivida control panel, and making sure Windows is fully up to date. Seems for some at least, the dGPU is on even when not actively being used, and there may be an issue in a particular Windows revision that contributes to the issue.

 

However, given that there's so many reports of nearly exactly the same behavior. This may be endemic to this model. It very well might be worth pursuing an RMA with Dell.

I've heard of these issues. As far as I could tell, they were concerning the "smart hibernarion" function of windows, which made people furious as their laptops would lose massive amounts of charge over night. As I shut down my laptop every evening (at least), thats not an issue to me.

 

My issue is that, when I use it lightly, i lose massive amounts of charge. There was a case that I could find where a person had missing updates and therefore the System did garbagio collezione in the background for information about the system status. But thats definitely not whats happening here. As i was on the road and didnt have a flash drive with me, i couldnt do a clean install. What i'll do tomorrow is get a bare bones win 10 install on it, check if the issue persists, and then, one by one, install dell's tools in order to see what is causing it. If it's still an issue with bare win 10 (and the drivers, of course), i'll RMA it, wouldn't be my first interaction with Dell customer support.

[James Fin]

No idea what happened. I did a fresh install and downloaded all the applications that I needed, and did a 2 hour idle and two hour mixed usage test. Idling between 2 - 6 watts, mixed usage max is 14 watts. The battery on the XPS is pretty bang on, actually, I don't know what happened. I guess crappy drivers.

[Aronish]

On 5/5/2021 at 11:33 AM, James Fin said:

No idea what happened. I did a fresh install and downloaded all the applications that I needed, and did a 2 hour idle and two hour mixed usage test. Idling between 2 - 6 watts, mixed usage max is 14 watts. The battery on the XPS is pretty bang on, actually, I don't know what happened. I guess crappy drivers.

Hi James, I've been struggling with the exact same issue since past 8 months trying to find a solution but unable to. Wherever I have read, its some driver messing up with the power management and draining the battery and when you do a Windows refresh, it kinda refreshes the ACPI drivers and settings and everything runs well for next 3 months or so and then the issue comes back. Have you encountered anything like this after your Windows re-install?