XPS 13 9343 Poor Battery

You have a very power hungry machine with the i7 and 4K display. 99% to 80% in 45 min does seem like a quick drop, however the Windows battery meter can be inaccurate. I recommend timing the entire system from 100% until it dies. That will show if you have an abnormal battery.

Just a note: Batteries only have a 1 year warranty from the time of purchase.

Most batteries have Time and Cycle count warranty's.

Aka 400 to 500 charge/discharge cycles which is why they are only guaranteed for 1 year.

Thank you for your comments.

I feel it important to note that the purpose for this post was to reach out to other 9343 owners with the hopes of gathering their feedback on the issue.

To clarify, my other XPS 13 models are all I7 models, quad cores compares to this dual core. The I7 on the 9343 is a dual core chip and far more energy efficient than the older models I have, with the exception of my 9333 which should be on par with the 9343.

That being said, the 9343 is less than a month old, I don't think we'd find anyone who's owned one for more than 2 months. I am familiar with dell's warranty policy but I'm also within the return window which leaves me with more options.

To summarize, I'm more concerned with knowing whether or not others are having the same or similar problems with the 9343 and battery life. I've only been able to find issues with the fan, however, I'm still very disappointed that both my 9333 and L322x are out-lasting my new 9343 in terms of battery life.

I am running a new XPS 13 i5 256G, touchscreen model, purchased from the Microsoft Store in March 2015.

The battery life has never gone above 9 hours and usually maximizes around 7-8 hours, but could be less depending what I am doing.  Basically, I use the machine for email, internet searches and an occasional airplane movie and have been surprised how big of a discrepancy there is between the advertised 15 hour battery life and what I have been experiencing. 

At the time of writing this I have Outlook and Internet Explorer open, a 48% charge and "1 hr 55 min remaining."  Yes, battery life is all over the place but with a 48% charge I expect 6 to 7 hours remaining. 

Battery life was a selling point on this unit and while the machine is otherwise great, I bought it expecting to charge it at night and not keep it plugged in throughout the day, which is not the case. 

I am having *huge* battery issues.  I get < 4 hrs of useful battery life, and with very light usage -- email, web browsing, Word and PowerPoint editing.  Twice this week I have started the day with a fully charged battery, gone in and out of meetings (with machine on sometimes and asleep much of the time), to find the battery dead before noon.  Completely unacceptable.

I find the battery drains unbelievably fast.  Yesterday, it was at 70% after 30 minutes.  If we were to accept the advertised stats for this machine (11 hrs) then that would mean that 30% of the battery should happen after ~3 hrs, not 30 minutes. 

I have also had very mixed results in speaking with Dell support.  Twice I've had Dell tech support tell me that 'a 4 cell battery really gets about that much performance,' which is striking since it's so far out of line with the way this machine has been promoted and described across multiple sites -- Dell's own, also Microsoft Store and elsewhere.  I'm hoping for a more fundamental resolution in the next few days.

I'm glad I'm not alone in this. Dell Tech Support was not helpful and at times, very rude. At one point, the tech support agent made it seem that I was lying about the 11 hour battery life, I had to point him to the product site and wait for him to read it before he believed me. After weeks of trying to get the issue resolved, I ended up returning the laptop...HORRIBLE experience. 

I purchased the top spec mac daddy i7, QHD, 8GB etc version.

I just received my new toy a few days ago and im extremely unimpressed!

The battery is completely *** im lucky if i get 4 hours use while surfing and replying to emails with the odd word doc thrown in. Screen res is down 2 settings and the brightness is set at 40%.

The performance is rubbish, i have the older L322X and its just as quick even with only 4GB of ram. 

It will be getting sent back shortly!

Hi

I have the top spec unit too (all be it the 256gb version)... unboxed it yesterday, spent all evening resolving the fan issue....

Today I took it work with no charger (expecting to get 8 hours no problem out of a notebook advertised as having 15 hours in it)... got to lunch time and battery was flat! 

All I did with it this morning was some email, Excel and Word work along with a bit of websurfing.

Totally unacceptable, I have raised a ticket with Dell and I have warned Amazon where it came from to expect it back unless I find a cure this evening (and looking at this thread I doubt that now).

Shame it is a lovely machine... let down by basic flaws.

I see a Macbook in my future (to be fair this XPS was to be a replacement for a 2010 Macbook Air that is on its last legs...)

How do these manufactures get away with such hopeless lies on their promo? Also what are all the media reviewers on... I honestly thought this thing was a Macbook rival at least (or killer if some reviews were to be believed)

Paul

London

Hi Paul,

I echo all of your points, especially that I was looking for a Macbook replacement with rival battery life.

Great machine, aesthetically and performance is good, but the battery goes from top to bottom in what seems to be a senseless pattern since it occurs when very little CPU usage is required. 

I would also like to see Dell come out with a response or fix since we've all bought into their claim of 15 hours and there is absolutely no way to back it up.

Cheers,

Preston

I have the new 9343 FHD 128gb i5 model. Running ubuntu 15.04. Really disappointed with the battery life getting 3-4 hours at most. The battery drains fast. I first got the laptop preinstalled with ubuntu 14.04, and that gave me 1-2 hours more. Might return this and get a macbook...

these helped me to prolong the battery time of the xps 13 2015 (windows 8.1 and 10) and i hope it helps you to:

turn off all background tasks that call / synchronize with any type of cloud (adobe, onedrive...)
turn off wifi, sound and bluetooth when possible
use black backgrounds or at least darkgreys
turn the brightness of the screen low
open energy-saver and turn on the prower saver plan and change advanced power settings to the minimal required porwer (pcie, display, wifi, processor power management, background tasks ...)
open Dell Command | Power Manager set Thermal Management to Quiet

I just purchased this laptop... following the same trend that you all have

the same advertisement that got me

Did anyone keep this laptop? Anyone have any better experience when using the i5 8gb FHD instead of the i7 qhd full loaded stuff? is there a battery difference?

i spoke to a representative about it being false advertisment, the tech denied in every account to cover themselves liability wise

but the tech announced that the laptop can only achieve 4-5 hours... the 11 hours is "BASIC settings and hardware" MEANING NO QHD, NO OS .. some *** like that..

I cant believe even after this long, dell wont admit the laptops battery is *** and actually help us resolve the issue.

I WANT THIS LAPTOP, BUT ITS USELESS.

I AM also looking for a mac.. *** this

Hello,

The unit I have is an i5 8gb and the battery life is the issue at hand when I started this post.  I'm sure the i7 consumes more power. 

I have kept the laptop because of the body size-to-screen size ratio and also that the new Mac lacks USB ports and other common connections which are essential to every day use.

Aside from increasing battery life, which will not happen, I ask Dell to update and improve the software which measures the remaining battery life so the computer calculations are more accurate and stop having such large fluctuations within short time periods. 

Hi,

I went all out and spent $1600 on the i7 256GB touchscreen.

The Battery lasts no more than 2 hours.

Do we need to file a class action for FALSE ADVERTISING?