XPS 15 (9550) Thoughts

[JB-]

I've had the new DELL XPS 15 (9550) for a week or two now and I am pretty unimpressed so I thought I would do a little write up of what irks me about it here and see if there are any other LTT users with this notebook and see if they're having the same issues.

 

The first thing I noticed when I received the notebook was a bright pixel dead center of the screen, I thought that was pretty bad but when I got to googling it I saw that some users were dealing with clusters of dead or bright pixels on their displays so guess I got lucky. The good news is after a really short chat with DELL online chat I had a tech here the next business day who replaced the screen and it's now perfect.

 

The next thing I noticed is the speakers. In my opinion the actual speakers are not that bad for a slim notebook like this they're fairly loud and I think sound good enough for the average user, I would definitely prefer to use headphones though. The issue with my XPS is that the speakers sound terrible due to the rattling that the speakers produce as low as 25% volume. Music with Piano playing sounds horrible and most annoyingly speech is really bad so films & YouTube presenters sound horrible. This can be helped by changing the sound profile from "Maxxsense" to "voice" but that pretty much just makes everything quieter and sound flat. I know this is an issue with the build quality because pressing my palms on either side of the mousepad almost completely eliminates the vibrating sound at 80% Volume and completely removes it below 70% Volume.

 

I saved my biggest issue for last; It doesn't wake from sleep. When I manually put the notebook to sleep I can wake it fine I've never waited more than a few minutes to test this though so maybe there is some ultra-low power mode that it enters after a certain amount of sleep time that is causing the issue. When I leave the notebook for a long time without closing the lid and it enters sleep itself it becomes impossible to wake up without holding down the power button and forcing a shut down and then starting it back up again. To me that is a deal breaker for a notebook as I want it to be ready to go when I need it and obviously can't have it constantly on without killing the battery.

 

Other than those issues it's perfect the display is beautiful (besides the horrible 4K support, seriously? feels like this should be solved by now) it's absolutely silent and it's lightning fast. Unfortunately though the quality control issues have killed it for me and I'm going to be returning it. I will test out a replacement before I go for a complete refund and will update this post if anybody is interested on how that goes but I'm not very hopeful.

 

This was all tested with the latest BIOS & Drivers available for the machine as of the date of this post.

 

Would love to hear from other New XPS 15 owners on what their experiences are!

[Dackzy]

I have never owned the XPS 15 or 13, but I fixed a lot of Dell laptops and they are just not that well build, in general if you want to get a Dell that doesn't have a problem then you have to buy a business laptop from them.

[nikolizaseden]

http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/xps-15-9550-laptop/pd Can you pls help me. I want to buy it but you can only buy it in the US. Im from EU (slovenia). And if i want to buy the laptop i will need to wait 3-4 mounths + it will cost 2,500€ (2750 $).

[Dackzy]

http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/xps-15-9550-laptop/pd Can you pls help me. I want to buy it but you can only buy it in the US. Im from EU (slovenia). And if i want to buy the laptop i will need to wait 3-4 mounths + it will cost 2,500€ (2750 $).

You could buy it on amazon or buy it from a local IT store