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XPS 13 9350, battery life
The marketing for this laptop claimed very long battery life (11 or 12 hours I think) but it has never achieved anything like this for me. Even when brand new I'd get maybe 4 hours at best, with non-intensive use (Word, Excel etc. - not games, YouTube, web browsing) - even with brightness turned down low and Wi-fi disabled; I also disabled the touchscreen a long time ago. I have always had the latest BIOS and Windows updates.
So Dell's claims for battery life are completely untrue, at least in my case.
Today a typical annoying situation occurred: after 2 hours' use the battery said it had about 1.5 hours left, but a few minutes later it suddenly warned that it had less than 10% power and only 7 minutes left, so I had to shut down and stop work!
Any suggestions for anything further I can do? (Don't see much point replacing the battery as its life was poor even when new.)
ejn63
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April 20th, 2018 12:00
Battery life is highly dependent upon power management settings, and the system configuration -- more RAM, a higher resolution screen -- 4K in particular), can drastically alter the estimates.
Manufacturers commonly quote times for battery runs with every possible power management setting enabled - dimmest screen, slowest CPU, timeouts, etc. -- essentially the way auto manufacturers' estimates of miles per gallon were once achievable only when driving downhill with a hurricane at your back.
You can take the manufacturer estimate and divide by two for a real-world estimate -- so, if it was quoted as 11-12, that's 5-6 in the real world (and probably more like 3-4 if you have a QHD screen).
This system is now a couple of years old, and together with your symptoms mean the battery is dying of age -- the one thing to watch very carefully for is the fact that when these batteries reach end of life, they do commonly swell up -- which can at first impede the use of the trackpad, and if the battery is left in the system, can physically destroy the case, mainboard, etc.
Read this.
trippa
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November 15th, 2019 07:00
I never get more than 2 hours of battery life with my XPS 13 9350 i7 8GB RAM when watching movies on VLC or doing a video call on Facebook (Chrome Browser with no other open tabs) it got worser with my old battery, so i did replace, still not more than 2 hours of battery life possible
IS THIS REALLY NORMAL? It's far away from the values Dell promises