XPS 13 9310, battery drain issue

We have a 7390 with the same issues.

We were getting 1 1/2 to 2 hours and had to literally beg and scream for Dell to finally replace the battery.  It was bad...grossly swollen.

The brand new battery shows some improvement 2 - 3 hours with light to normal usage...which can be stretched to around 4 hours, but only if everything possible is shut off or disconnected, no wifi, bluetooth, etc. and screen at minimal brightness.

This is ridiculous!

We have spent endless hours trying to get this issue resolved by Dell.  At the end, after remote diagnostics, updates, tinkering and tweaking of settings, they tell us that everything is fine, that the system is working as designed, that is, to last 2 hours, so there is nothing they can do!

This is beyond absurd!

How does one know which services are useful or not, or perhaps even essential?  Dell even has a lot of their own stuff running.

In any case, we have mostly tried everything you have suggested.

With everything disabled, disconnected, shut down, etc....and doing absolutely nothing we can extend the battery life to a whopping 4 hours (while doing absolutely nothing).

Not anything near the promised "incredibly long"....

@abhishek_18  Sorry, I should have tagged you in the previous reply.

What is perhaps most disturbing to us is that Dell technicians, every single one of them, have told us that the 4-cell batteries are only supposed to last around 2 hours.  Yes, even when new.

We even got that in writing from a Mr. Surendra Raj of Advanced Resolutions Solutions. 

"I had informed earlier that each cell on the battery lasts for about 20-30 minutes. The four cell battery will not last for 17 hours"

Bizarrely, he refuses to do the math and actually say 2 hours.  "I have never mentioned anywhere that our computers were designed to last for only two hours at most.".

This is a blatant contradiction which has nothing to do with the real life experience of any of us here.

Sales and promotions promise the sky...tech says NOPE.

I still find it hard to believe that Dell could get away with such a big lie.

What I suspect is that most people actually get fairly good battery life and that tech people are given this script to avoid having to resolve some very real problems of many of its customers.

This is, of course, despicable.  Having promoted so fervently the "incredibly long battery life" it shouldn't take a tech genius to make this happen, or have to disable things right and left, even stuff that Dell put there in the first place.

I have also seen it suggested here that certain models have design flaws which negatively impact the battery.

In which case Dell has to make good and repair or replace these systems.

Or some of us may have other hardware issues, not readily detected by remote diagnostics.

For us, Dell has delayed things so long that we are now out of warranty.

So what does Mr. Narendra Raj do?  Offer to sell us an extended warranty!

Yes, of course, YMMV, "up to 19 hours" is not a guarantee of 19 hours.

But 2 hours normal and "as per design"?

Nope, no way, no how.

This is not in any way acceptable.

@DELL-Jesse L Then why are Technical Support people all told to say that 2 hours is the "normal" expected battery life for a 4-cell battery. 

I even have that in writing from Mr. Narendra Raj of AR: 

"I had informed earlier that each cell on the battery lasts for about 20-30 minutes. The four cell battery will not last for 17 hours which you are looking for."

No one seems willing to address this very basic contradiction.  Perhaps you can do so.

I have a XPS 13, 2 in 1, i7, 16b ram, fhd screen. I had out of the box ~ 6h battery life with basic editing/ web browsing on min. brightness. Definitely completely misleading and False for Dell to market the battery life as 14h. In any case, I managed to increase the battery life to 9.5h with some tuning. Here is what worked for me

- Windows battery saver mode

- Open up 'Dell Power Manager' and go to Battery extender and switch it on. This reduces the CPU power to improve battery performance (apparently).

- Go to 'Background Apps' in the Windows settings and switch off everything that you don't need.

- Open up Color management in Windows along with Intel Graphics Command center. In the Intel graphics command center go to 'Display', click on the 'Color' tab, and add a new profile. Go through the color management to calibrate the brightness and contrast of the display using the options in the Intel command center window. ---> My laptop had excessive default brightness and poor color calibration out of the box. This is separate from the regular screen brightness.

Doing the above improved the battery life for me, while also make the screen colors look better. Finally, use the Windows battery report for measurement while tuning:

- Open Windows powershell as administrator and type: powercfg /batteryreport /output "report.html"

Good luck!

So I have a 9319 with 32GB of RAM. Like you all bought it for the great battery life. Even the independent reviews get 12 hours. What are we doing wrong?

Also spoke the Dell support and they said the claims on battery life were outrageous. Even though it’s quoted on their website. 

I feel there must be something we are missing. Battery Saver on and Max 6 hours. Well that’s what it quotes on the battery icon, not tried it to see how it’s actually performs. 

Also noticed that when full charged and start up the battery is already at 98%. 

Very strange. Anyone had any luck?

James

@WJProctor 

No real luck here.  I finally gave up after countless hours of frustration.  At the last stage, I was offered a bribe in the form of a power bank.  I was also offered a trip to the depot for my unit...but that would mean several weeks without a computer and no guarantee even then that the problem would be solved.  No in home service by a technician was possible.  And of course they would not offer a replacement.  Since the battery issue for me was not essential, I naturally declined the trip.

I did get one admission from ARS...

That the pandemic has caused a greatly increased demand for Dell products (they must be raking in the dough) and concurrently the need for tech support has likewise increased, resulting in inadequately trained technicians inadequately supervised (since most are working from home).

Of course that should not be our (the customers) problem.

Good luck!

Thats makes some sense about the low skill techs. It seems like it was getting better, but still no where near ideal! I’ll keep wishing for a fix but am not hopeful. 

It’s things like this that just confuse me. https://www.laptopmag.com/uk/reviews/dell-xps-13-late-2020

James

@WJProctorWhat still shocks is the party line that is always, ALWAYS followed...that 2 hours (or 20 -30 minutes per cell) is "normal".  It is also shocking that almost no one, even supervisors and managers, appear aware of their company's own ads, to say nothing of independent reviews.  I literally...yes literally...had to guide their screens (during remote diagnostics) to show them these promotions on Dell's own website.

Almost all the agents I spoke to (many dozens) were completely polite and even friendly.  But it looks like they were just given a short script from which to read. 

Some made valiant attempts to explain the obvious discrepancies.

For instance, that benchmark tests are done with the best or most ideal systems, so the ones we own won't live up to them.

But others gave the exact opposite!  That better systems will drain more power!

In the end, the obvious contradictions were just ignored.  Remote diagnostics did not find anything so our computer is working properly.  End of story.

Maybe the worst aspect of all this is the extreme difficulty, even impossibility of escalating issues to a level that might achieve a satisfactory solution.  Instead, the most usual outcome is to be put on an unending merry-go-round, shoved from one department to the next and back again and again and again and again and again and again....

Of course, most people will just give up.

I was told the quoted time was ludicrous , it could never be achieved! 

Hi FlashKartoon,

I also ordered an xps 9310 2-in-1 with touch screen and killer wifi. it is delivered with Windows and I am going to install linux on it. Same to your case, I am a Ubuntu user.

Could you release a bit more details of your case? I would appreciate your reply.

1. Your Ubuntu os is generic image or customized  Ubuntu by Dell? If would be helpful to post the ubuntu image download link. After solving the battery drain issue, how is your battery life time now?

2. Do your have dual boot of windows and ubuntu or standalone ubuntu?

3. Does the stylus PN579X work fine on Ubuntu?

Thank you in advance.

I have the same issue with a new XPS13 9310, BIOS version 2.0.0 from 01/28/2021.  So, the issue was either not resolved by a previous BIOS update release or there's a regression.  The issue here, as far as I can tell, is that there seems to be no option available to suspend the system to a "deep" state.  Instead, there is only the "s2idle" option available, which merely turns off the display.

See the following output as evidence:

# cat /sys/power/mem_sleep 
[s2idle]

So, I just realized that there is no s3idle option either.  While s2 can be used for a faster way to get the system from a suspend state, it's not at all clear why there are no other options available at all.  According to the linux kernel documentation, s2idle is always available, while the other options are dependent on platform support: https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/power/states.txt

The meaning of the "mem" string is controlled by the /sys/power/mem_sleep file.
It contains strings representing the available modes of system suspend that may
be triggered by writing "mem" to /sys/power/state. These modes are "s2idle"
(Suspend-To-Idle), "shallow" (Power-On Suspend) and "deep" (Suspend-To-RAM).
The "s2idle" mode is always available, while the other ones are only available
if supported by the platform (if not supported, the strings representing them
are not present in /sys/power/mem_sleep). The string representing the suspend
mode to be used subsequently is enclosed in square brackets. Writing one of
the other strings present in /sys/power/mem_sleep to it causes the suspend mode
to be used subsequently to change to the one represented by that string.

Latest BIOS update does not at all address this design flaw.  I'm still not sure if this is a hardware limitation or just something that a firmware/software update could fix. 

# dmidecode |grep 'BIOS Revision'
        BIOS Revision: 2.1
root@xps13:~# cat /sys/power/mem_sleep 
[s2idle]