XPS 13 9310, battery drain issue

@DELL-Jesse L 

How long can we expect the battery life to be with a 100% charge using this new bios?

Any news on this? I just received a 2-in-1 XPS 13 with a 4k screen but the battery life is not even bad, it's abysmal.

I changed the resolution to lower, brightness to 40%, changed to the adaptive battery in Dell Power, and to "Better Battery Life" in Windows 10. By only using MS Edge I can get a maximum of 2 hours and 30minutes of usage. I am losing 40% of the battery every 1hour of use. And yes, I have the new BIOS installed already (2.0.0).

I still can return it, and I will if this is what I can expect in general from this device.

I am surprised, especially that Lenovo and HP have much better battery life from what I have read on UHD/3K displays (even often bigger screens - 14inch). Two-three hours battery life is not something that any company should strive for in portable ultrabooks. Especially when the dell website says it's 7h+ on the battery, which is over two/three times higher than actual numbers. 

Also - shouldn't the battery last longer when I lower the resolution? Which I did and it did extend my battery life to whooping 3 hours.

Even on their website, it claims "Experience incredibly long battery life — up to 14 hours on a Full HD+ model when streaming your favorite shows or up to 8 hours and 16 minutes of streaming on a 4K+ model." What I can't understand is how this ever got production with such poor performance (even on battery saving modes).

 

EDIT: I just saw that you mention this advertising as well - yes, this is a poor choice by Dell as it's clearly miles away from the real numbers. Also - I think there is BIOS 2.0.0 now - at least that what I have installed. No changes though as well to the battery life.

I am trying to return mine and buy HP, hopefully it will be better (and from what I have read - it is).

 

@notojacek = the 4k display is known for draining significantly more battery than simple FHD+ (=reason why I went for FHD+). So I'm unfortunately not so surprised about your figures.. but also very disapointed with FHD+

On my FHD+ model, even after upgrading to latest BIOS 1.4.0, battery life does not seem to improve = remains about 5h with minimal brightness, bluetooth off and simply browsing the web over wifi. The only reply I had from DELL support was a private message saying = "We are terribly sorry for the confusion and this situation, unfortunately modern units could only last longer than 5 hours with minimum use of energy."

Just wondering why DELL keeps advertising up to 11h streaming withe FHD+ and 8h for 4k, on their website - we are all miles away from such battery life performance..

DELL web site - new XPS13

 

I don't work for Dell nor am I associate it with them. Just trying to help.

Search for command prompt, by hitting the windows key and type "cmd", DO NOT HIT ENTER.

Right click on the command prompt and select run as administrator

Now, type:

powercfg /sleepstudy /output "C:/sleep.html"

Go to your hard drive and locate the generated file at the root of your c drive, sleep.html.
Open it up and it should provide you some insights on that is going on.

It is also possible the 9310 only offers Modern Standby for Windows or Suspend to Idle for the Linux adventurers, power modes.
If that is the case, it means deep sleep is not supported by the firmware on this machine, hence it will slow drain while sleeping.

HTH!

Thinking of returning since my lenovo with a 10th gen is getting 8 hours 

This is a big disappointment since Dell help just told me I can expect 2 hours of battery life with this laptop! 

Its advertised as 12 hours. I just do not understand this 

11th gen i5 EVO laptop 

1920x1200 screen 

all drivers and bios updated 

6 hours 30 minutes of battery life 

EVO states 8 hours 

this is not fulfilling expectations 

 

Same problem with FHD display under Linux.

This is simply unacceptable.in a Laptop in this price segment.

Either this gets fixed or this will be my first and LAST Dell laptop.

My battery life was awful at first. Normally averaging 4 hours ish with just browsing and word processing.

I ended up totally formatting the drive and installing Windows again.(If you do this remember to change the storage driver to AHCI or you will need a driver on installation).

I now get 9 hours average, sometimes Windows battery bar reports over 14 hours but I didn't expect that to last. It seems that some of the Dell drivers or software drain battery significantly. Modern sleep also drains battery when operating, there is a .reg file you can get to add an option to disable connectivity when sleeping in advanced power options.

I have Dell XPS 9310 (Ubuntu 20.04) with 1920x1080 non-touch display (Core i7) and also not satisfied with battery.

Battery discharges too fast when I use notebook for websites browsing.

If the laptop is on suspend during the night (12 hours) battery loses about 7% of charge. It is not normal!

Looks like it is a common Dell problem, because Latitude 7490 also drains such huge amount of charge during night suspend.

My old Macbook Pro 13 (early 2015) with i7 shows much better results.

I also have checked whether laptop loses battery charge if completely switched off -- no, that's fine. 100% remained after night.

And the most strange thing that when I purchased the laptop (it was in sealed package) its battery was fully empty 0%. Has anyone else experienced the same?

Hi, No change with newest BIOS update

Hi, My XPS 13 9310 (FDH+ non-touch) is only 14 days old, and I only get 4hours on a fully charged battery. Apparently, Microsoft is aware of battery drain issues with the Chromium-based Edge: "Microsoft brings an experimental feature to Chrome to improve battery life" https://techdows.com/2019/08/microsoft-brings-an-experimental-feature-to-chrome-to-improve-battery-life.html The article is from 2019, so a fix is still in the making, I guess.

@muxoll 

Tks for sharing the article from techdows.com but the present issue obersved on XPS13-9310 is rather specific to DELL machines (unfortunately), while similar machines from competitors achieve much better battery life. The chromium-based Edge browser possibly does not help, but is not the source of the issue here.

You would observe same limited battery life with simply running word.. or other web browser.

Was also hoping the new BIOS update would help, sounds like it is not..

@DELL-Jesse L, @The-peepta Updating BIOS doesn't affect battery life at all.

@David_Dsi51 I've changed the settings for keyboard illumination in BIOS setup to "Dim" instead of fully illuminated (default). During daytime it could be turned off completely, I guess. I found the tip on cnet.com: https://www.cnet.com/how-to/all-about-laptop-batteries-updated/ "Your LCD's backlight uses up to 10 watts of power, a huge battery drain." Keyboard illumination can be controlled via F5 and has 3 levels: off - dim (50%) - full illumination (100%). Using the dim level immediately gave my battery 1 more hour. The XPS 13 9310 11th gen i7-1185G7, 16 GB Ram, 1TB is not cheap, I would expect more.