Comment by brooke2k

Comment by brooke2k a day ago

18 replies

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I got a Dell XPS for work a couple years ago on someone's recommendation... one of my worst-ever decisions.

The touchpad sucks and routinely breaks requiring restarts, constantly having driver issues (and you have to deal with the capital-N Nightmare that is SupportAssist for drivers), graphics card is busted and makes the display driver crash once a month.

Power states are completely broken. Laptop will randomly turn on when it's in my bag and rev up to ten thousand degrees. Laptop will randomly, when on full battery and closed, decide to hard-shutoff leading to a windows recovery boot.

Decides to do BIOS updates when it's at 3% battery in the middle of the night, then when I wake up for work the next morning it has to go through a ten-minute recovery sequence.

Battery is swelling after only a couple years of use, which sometimes causes keys on the keyboard to stop working. In the middle of a slack convo I've had to type "Sorrymyspacebarstoppedworkinggottarestartmycomputer".

BSODs, hard drive corruption, you name it. Never buy Dell. Not that there's many good options out there unless you're willing to drop two week's pay on a Framework - but anything is better than Dell.

EDIT: Another I thought of - sound card is busted and sounds like it has a low pass filter on it. I know it's not a speaker issue because on occasion it magically fixes itself until the next restart.

microtonal a day ago

Power states are completely broken. Laptop will randomly turn on when it's in my bag and rev up to ten thousand degrees.

If it was in sleep - Dell themselves recommend completely switching off a laptop before putting it inside a backpack:

https://www.dell.com/community/en/conversations/xps/faq-mode...

For somebody who has used MacBooks the last 18 years, this is insane.

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  • speedgoose a day ago

    The laptops waking up in the backpack until the thermal security triggers or the battery is empty is a Microsoft Windows thing.

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    • freehorse a day ago

      Ime turning windows laptops off is really hard. You tell them to shutdown and they restart for some reason, and it does not seem to be update related because it happens with laptops completely offline too. So you may think that you have shut them down, close the lid, but actually they reboot and when you get to them again they are dead. This happens with some dell laptops but I do not think it is just them. Not all the time but very randomly.

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      • baiwl a day ago

        To shut Windows down, press Win+R to see the Run dialog and then type shutdown /s /t 0

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      • tmerc a day ago

        I haven't found a way to tell Windows 10 to hibernate other than making that the power button action in power options. Maybe because it's a laptop but it starts immediately after hibernating and your have to hold the power button to fully turn it off. This works and skips any forced updates Windows wants to do. It is very janky and I think ms does it to make skipping updates harder.

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    • trashface 18 hours ago

      I've seen it on my system 76 (clevo) laptop from 2019 on linux, and on windows on the same hardware. I think its a firmware power state design bug. I have a lenovo from 2012 that never had this problem.

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      • red-iron-pine 30 minutes ago

        same manufacturer and vintage (maybe 2020?), and same problem.

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    • olejorgenb a day ago

      Not really - my Dell Precision (Ubuntu Certified even) frequently have problems going to sleep. To be fair - technically it doesn't wake up in the backpack - it fails to sleep in the first place. But if you don't pay attention you wont notice the failure so I'd say that's very close to just as bad.

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  • adrian_b a day ago

    I have never understood why some people want to avoid switching off their computers.

    I have stopped using Apple laptops more than 15 years ago and since then I have used only Linux laptops.

    I have no idea whether hibernate worked on my laptops, because this is a feature for which I have never felt any need.

    I always take care to optimize the boot time on my computers with custom built kernels and carefully selected daemons (and I do not use systemd). For decades, the boot time on my laptops had been of perhaps twenty seconds at most and the biggest delay in starting to use the computers after being powered off is entering a password to unlock them, not the start-up of the OS. Using something like hibernation instead of complete power off would speed up negligibly the process of beginning to work on the computer.

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    • eckelhesten a day ago

      Pop open the lid, be right back to where you were. No amount of boot time optimizations will trump that.

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    • edgineer a day ago

      Sleep is just different from shut down. With an unplugged laptop, after an idle period or by shutting the lid, I'd like the machine to save energy. I haven't always taken the steps to prepare for a shut down, saving open documents. I wouldn't like to wake back up an idle machine to see that my programs had all been closed.

      And sometimes I'd like to quickly put a laptop into a bag without waking it up just to shut it down first. If I had a way to transition from sleep to shut down I'd use it, but also... this is where I see that if the sleep state were more perfect (used zero energy, zero unintended wakeups), it would obviate my need to shut down most of the time.

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    • [removed] 15 hours ago
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  • throwaway808081 a day ago

    It's all about trade-offs really.

    In this case, a laptop sometimes waking up in a bag vs a constantly and deliberately cripled GUI and keyboard.

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rozap a day ago

The recent-ish Dell XPS I had for work was the worst hardware I've ever had in my entire life, full stop. The touchpad was an abomination. Like, nobody bothered to use it before it shipped. Just completely broken. I also experienced everything else you experienced with regard to power management. That fact that a team of human beings could create something so awful actually made me depressed.

Very happy with my framework when I switched jobs. And my asus zenbook was also great.

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  • markus_zhang a day ago

    Does your job actually give you a Framework? Where do you work?! I’d like to join.

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vunderba 9 hours ago

My last decent PC laptop was a Lenovo Thinkpad T530. That thing was a chunky black brick and felt like it was made from recycled Soviet-era tanks. Super modular, easy to upgrade RAM, drives, etc.

I got practically 10 years out of it. My next machine was a Dell XPS (Infinity Edge) laptop. I ordered it direct from Dell, unboxed it, turned it on and let it run the standard set of Windows updates. Came back an hour later and it was hung in a BSOD state. Rebooted and everything seemed to be working smoothly again but it was... concerning so I left it running overnight. Came back to YET ANOTHER BSOD the next morning and was like F### this.

Immediately RMA and sent it back. If your QC is a hot circle of garbage for a nearly $3000 machine then I have zero faith in your company.

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cedws a day ago

Yep, I had the high end "Developer Edition" a while back and it was a terrible experience. Very hot, build quality was poor, touchpad was small, speakers were terrible. I don't think I could use anything other than a MacBook now.

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