r/DellXPS

I have been the using the 2026 Dell XPS 14 (OLED, Ultra X7 358H) for the last two weeks and am pretty disappointed with the battery life. According to several reviews, I should be getting more than 10 hours in real world use, but I am ranging between 6-8 hours. For reference, my use case is 75% screen brightness, 120hz with dynamic refresh rate on, light web browsing and video streaming, along with Spotify in the background. Is there something wrong with my unit or is this what I should expect?

I got a new laptop and an SD25TB5 and they work fine together, but I want to be able to plug in my older XPS 15 9560 that has thunderbolt 3. The TB5 dock is supposed to be backwards compatible to TB3 my l but my XPS refuses to recognize it. Doesn't charge the laptop and no luck connecting the displays. The light on the dock doesn't turn on either when connected.

The dock is on the most current firmware and I installed the most recent thunderbolt drivers from Dell but no luck.

Is this a known issue? Is there anyone else out there that's had success connecting TB5 dock to TB3 laptops?

I picked up a used i7 9510 with a 3050 gpu. The battery that it came with was toast so I bought an OEM replacement. I am only getting max 3-4 hours of 1080p YouTube video playback time. The 3050 is disabled. It is running all on Intel video drivers. The FHD panel is at 40% brightness. I have undervolted the cpu with throttlestop. Power profile is set to energy saver. Turbo is disabled in BIOS. I was honestly expecting much better battery life with all these changes? Am I missing something or is this to be expected???? It’s not the OLED display and i9 cup that I have seen people complain about battery life so this is weird to me. I am not even running demanding tasks.

I put out what was way beyond my means many, many years ago, for my red, white and black Dell XPS 9100.

I bought a beautiful Monitor with it.

It is from 2010.

I have been helping it struggle along through all the decades of Technology changes.

It is running Windows 7.

I got over the fact McAfee is no longer supported on it.

Yesterday something odd happened.

I had been successfully using Firefox for months now.

I lost it, and when I went to try to reinstall it, it would not let me

Even Internet Explorer is acting odd.

It would only allow me to browse via something which says

InPrivate

I am so lost.

Does anyone know about this?

Thanks

Just wanted to compare notes - I'm trying Fedora on my 2026 XPS 16 with the OLED display and everything seems to work except that the display seems to be stuck at ~30Hz (hard to tell but it's definitely less than 60) no matter what I set the refresh rate to and dynamic brightness control seems to do random things. Pretty sure it's a display problem and not an iGPU problem because an external display is totally fine.

ETA: Oh, and I guess more generally on the refresh rate, Linux doesn't seem to recognize that the panel is VRR at all. I can set it to 60Hz or 120Hz, but the setting doesn't seem to have any effect.

I wanted to share my experience with a new Dell XPS 14 DA14260 that I have been using since end of April

In the first two weeks, the laptop has had multiple instant power-offs. No blue screen, no freeze, no normal shutdown sequence. It just turns off completely. After turning it back on, the power button shows a diagnostic blink code: 1 amber + 6 white.

From Dell documentation, this code appears to be related to an Embedded Controller / EC code-flow error.

Windows logs also support that this is not a normal software crash:

- EventLog 6008: previous shutdown was unexpected

- Kernel-Power 41

- BugcheckCode: 0

- LongPowerButtonPressDetected: false

- WHEABootErrorCount: 1

- No MEMORY.DMP / no minidump

The laptop also has repeated BIOS Event Log entries saying:

“Alert! Cover was previously removed.”

The laptop was never opened by me.

Dell bios diagnostics passed successfully, but the issue is intermittent, so I do not think a passing quick diagnostic proves the laptop is fine.

I contacted Dell support. At first they seemed to focus on an already planned fan/heatsink service, but I do not think this is a fan/thermal issue because there are no thermal events, and the shutdown is instant. Later, support said the blink code may indicate a motherboard/mainboard issue.

The seller is willing to replace or refund the laptop, but they need a defect report from the service center. The problem is that the service center may not reproduce the shutdown during a short test.

Has anyone seen this on a recent XPS?

I really like the machine otherwise, but repeated sudden power loss on a new laptop is unacceptable, especially when it can destroy unsaved work.

https://preview.redd.it/34sje3yx9e1h1.png?width=1615&format=png&auto=webp&s=94e3f6e86ffb8223278abf6e770b25b10be62bec

I literally just got my XPS 14 (2026) a couple weeks ago; I got the 358H/2K screen but otherwise maxed out the 64GB RAM/4TB SSD for $3,500. I was fine paying that in the end but felt like a bit of a rube for getting fleeced due to the memory shortage. Well, now the same build is nearly $2,000 more???

Got my 2026 Dell XPS 14 on May 7th and have been using it every day since for school, projects, and normal productivity stuff. Specs are Intel Core Ultra X7 358H, 32GB RAM, 1TB storage, and Intel Arc B390 graphics.

Mostly using it for Word, PowerPoint, Canvas, Canva, Google Slides, YouTube, Chrome tabs, and general multitasking. No gaming so I can’t really comment on that side.

Overall, performance has been really solid so far. I ran Cinebench R2026 multicore and got a 3269 score. Peak was around 3550 before settling lower during the sustained run, which I’m guessing is normal thermal/power behavior for a thin laptop.

Battery life has actually been pretty good for me. With normal school/productivity use, I’m usually getting close to around 2 days before needing to plug it in again, depending on brightness and workload.

A few things I’ve noticed though:

• The backspace key felt a little weird/soft at first compared to the other keys, but honestly it seems like it’s gotten better over time with use.
• Yesterday I randomly had some screen flickering while just sitting on the home screen. Restarted the laptop and it’s been completely fine since, so not sure if it was drivers or Windows.
• In HWiNFO after running Cinebench, “Core Power Limit Exceeded” shows “Yes” under current and maximum with 100%, and a bunch of the LP E-cores also show “Yes” for current/min/max. From what I understand now, that might just mean the CPU is hitting the laptop’s configured boost/power limits during benchmarks rather than an actual issue.
• Occasionally right after restarting, temps spike up to around 98-100C for a second before dropping back down quickly. Under normal use it doesn’t stay there.
• Cinebench also showed a weird “MHZ_ESTIMATE=inf” reading once, which I’m assuming is probably just a reporting bug.

Other than a few little bugs here and there, the laptop runs well. I’m guessing some of it could just be early drivers/firmware since these chips and GPUs are still pretty new.

Overall though, for school and productivity use, I’ve been liking it a lot so far.

Curious if anyone else with the new XPS 14 or Intel Ultra 200H series laptops has seen similar behavior or anything different.

We have year 2026 and DELL and Windows still cannot fix sleep mode after you close the lid. Please DELL, is it so hard to do one simple thing on your XPS notebooks?

• Lid closed -> go to sleep

Why, tell me why, do I need to take my notebook out of the bag a couple of times per month horribly hot and with the battery completely drained, because you did not put my notebook into sleep mode when I closed the lid?

The same thing that never worked on your notebooks still cannot be fixed to this day. My notebook cost like 3500 EUR (when 3500 EUR still was some money)... do you expect me to pay another 5000 EUR for this feature? I can tell, me. Will it work?

How to fix this please once and forever? (XPS 15")

Hey All,

Seen a lot of posts about the new XPS and thought I’d share my experience, ordered mine a while ago and finally got it in the post, will post specs below. Finally received it and unboxed and cracked on. About an hour in I noticed there was a tiny nick in the case on the bottom left hand side, I mean something 99% of people wouldn’t complain about and tbh something I wasn’t going to but not what you’d expect.

Next thing get it all setup and updated and then my dock doesn’t work with it, assumed it was some updates however nothing worked, assumed my dock was out of date but sure enough was compatible on the chart. Went to pro
Support.

They then said that they wanted to replace the motherboard which was extreme but thought okay, next day as im typing I notice that white powder which must be from the keys are all over my fingers, message Dell again and they decide to replace the full unit.

After another couple of days of persuading them to let me keep the current one until the new one arrives currently over a month in and still waiting for a new one.

I must admit aside from the issues above, beautiful laptop and really enjoying it so far but disappointing for the money paid

Intel U7
32GB RAM
1TB
OLED Touchscreen
16”

Hello fellow XPS owners!

I was excited to get my new Dell XPS 16 (2026) this week. I was using XPS 9520 for 3+ years and was very happy with it, with the exception of the keyboard that started failing after 1.5 years.

Started using the Dell XPS 16 (2026) side-by-side with the XPS 9520 yesterday, and noticed the screen was noticeably dimmer on the new laptop with the exact same settings. To add to my disappointment, the new laptop's screen (I prefer FHD, matte, non-touch screens) was noticeably more reflective than the old one. Overall, the older screen looked much brighter and crisper, with almost zero reflection. Unsure why the 2026 laptop will have a worse screen than a 2022 one. In any case, returning the new XPS and will keep using the old one. Here is a photo for reference.

Dell XPS 16 (2026) screen vs Dell XPS 9520 (2022)

I just received my new 2026 XPS 16 with the Tandem OLED panel but I'm wondering if I got a bad display unit.

There is a massive amount of grain/noise especially on dim solid or gradient colors that are darker. The grain is even visible on solid whites and greys at high brightness. This makes editing photos (especially astrophotography) impossible because its impossible to tell what is grain in the captured image vs what is produced by the screen. Objectively, my 4k panel on my XPS17 9710 looks much better aside from the reduced contrast.

I submitted a technical support ticket but that was closed as the agent claimed it was a USB issue in an email (with lots of wording errors) for some reason which is why I had to call in.

Once I called in, the agent was incredibly rude and dismissive and just told me to return it. He wouldn't even check with a hardware team or transfer me to someone who would be able to help, or allow and exchange. It's sad to see how far downhill Dell support has gone in the last 5 years as this was a completely different experience I had when dealing with my XPS 15 and XPS 17 devices.

Anyways, I have attached an image shot on a Sony A1II 50MP Full Frame Camera with a Macro Lens where the background is solid grey or near black. You can clearly see that the pixels are lit up inconsistently. Its even visible in the orange portion of the Microsoft logo where a couple blue pixels are lit up more that the others.

Is this normal or did I receive a lemon?

https://preview.redd.it/zhzag09g5d1h1.jpg?width=3982&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=bbb82d1aa21e64da798597ebc235e932074180d5

Hi all,

I am defending my PhD soon, and I have the chance to buy the laptop that the university gave me during my studies (in 2021). It's the Dell XPS 9500 (first gen), and IT told me I can buy it for around 350 USD. I did my phd with this laptop, and it could manage my workflow (data analysis, multiple Word and PPT documents, LabVIEW, Matlab, etc.) fine.

Specs:

CPU Core i7-10750H

GPU NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 Ti 

RAM 16GB DDR4

Display FHD+ (1920 x 1200), 500-nit

My personal opinion

Pros:

• I really like the build quality
• Amazing speakers (best speakers I heard so far, excluding the MBP)
• Even though the display is not 4K, FHD+ is enough for me and I like the 500 nits brightness
• I am the first user of this laptop (IT gave it to me new)

Cons:

• Terrible wifi adapter (very low speed on different routers, at the moment I am using it with Ethernet). If I end up buying it, I will purchase an external wifi adapter
• Flimsy trackpad (it was a big problem with the first generation of XPS laptops, but I saw some tutorials on YouTube on how to fix it)
• The battery is degraded and lasts about 1.5-2 hours (but it is expected for a 5-year-old laptop)
• A few months ago, I wanted to charge it, and I used one of the USB-C ports on the left side, but a warning icon showed up on the battery saying the port could not be used for charging the battery. After a few days, this problem disappeared, and now it charges just fine with the same port.

So is the 350 USD a good deal for this laptop?

Hi everyone,

I’m trying to debug a very annoying touchpad issue on a Dell XPS 14 DA14260.

The symptom is: while I’m simply moving one finger on the touchpad, text sometimes starts being selected as if the left mouse button were being held down. I am not intentionally clicking, pressing, or dragging. It happens when moving a finger in the upper central area of the touchpad.

This happens on both Ubuntu 26.04 and Windows 11, so I no longer think this is purely a GNOME/libinput issue. It looks more like a touchpad firmware/ hardware issue, or maybe a device-specific quirk.

Some debug logs from libinput:
event5 POINTER_MOTION 16 +109.455s -4.28/ -2.04 (-13.00/ -6.19) event5 POINTER_MOTION 17 +109.461s -3.62/ -2.04 (-11.00/ -6.19) 6636: event5 - button state: touch 0 from BUTTON_STATE_AREA event BUTTON_EVENT_UP to BUTTON_STATE_NONE ... event5 - gesture: [1fg] event GESTURE_STATE_POINTER_MOTION → GESTURE_EVENT_END → GESTURE_STATE_NONE

there are no pressure/click events.
i have updated touchpad firmware to the last version today - nothing changed.

Has anyone seen accidental text selection or click-drag while just moving a finger on the touchpad?

Hello!

I have a 2016)(!) XPS 13 I got from my aunt and it's a great laptop.

The battery doesn't work and it needs to stay plugged-in, but other than that its great, I use it at home all of the time for general browsing and watching stuff and I really like it.

Next year I'll begin university, majoring in math and physics and will need a functioning laptop, and I really want an XPS just because I really like its build and quality.

However, new ones are expensive to me, and I don't really need crazy power or anything, so I thought to get a second hand one.

Which year and spec do you think will be best for me?

I don't have a strict budget, but don't want to spend more than I need to get a functioning laptop for my studies. prefer to save the rest of the money for an iPad.

What would you get (with the hope that I will find a decent one in marketplace)?

Thanks!