Tatolino,

 Changing to a higher wattage power adapter will not change this. The LED blinking is not a fault. It is a result of the Dell Hybrid Power. It is working as designed.

Hey Tatolino,

I have spoken with the Level 3 engineer and he has again informed our product group.  He is currently waiting on information from the product team.  Once I hear back from him I will post the information here on this thread.

Update=

Hi there!

Yes it is a well known problem, but Dell isn't very keen on acknowledging it, for some reason...

What you are talking about, is commonly referred to as "blinking light", you can find a lot of information about it on this very forum, as well as on reddit. There's no fix to it, there's a workaround that comes highly recommended in your case: disable TurboBoost.

This is because Dell uses something called Hybrid charge, a solution that allows the system to draw energy from both the battery AND the AC adapter when TurboBoost is on (and sadly TurboBoost enables for the lightest kind of work), and unfortunately it also recharges the battery a little bit. This means your battery gets recharged more than 300 times per hour. And yes, it's not exactly the shortest powerburst ever seen, some times it blinks for several seconds. Not good for our batteries.

Take a look at this post here and you will find some interesting information.

Well, give a look at the link I posted before, there a video you could find quite interesting. You can replicate it yourself, you can leave CpuZ open and see what happens to frequencies when the light blinks: frequency goes up to the roof for apparently no reason (it could be your mail app checking for updates, it could be windows security checking for updates, anything really), even for just a split of a second, and the power light blinks.

Display doesn't need to flicker, that's something that would happen with 9310 2in1 models, and it's been fixed since. Actually the 2in1 model probably received a full fix for the whole problem, as their model stopped showing this blinking light misbehaviour after a couple of updates. While the regular clamshell model has been sort of abandoned to itself.

I would suggest you to check what happens in CpuZ when the light blinks. Unfortunately I'm quite positive you're the new member of our sad club.

Thanks, yeah I've been reading some more about it on here since posting, including the mammoth 14-page thread on the subject.

I'm not getting and display flickering issues and didn't think the turbo boost issue was relevant as it happens when the machine is just idling at the desktop with no heavy load on it.

Honestly, on a brand new i7 or i5 you don't really need TurboBoost, the difference is negligible, but the power consumption is insane. It's been debated over the years of how little efficient TurboBoost is, it more than doubles the consume for a temporary +20ish% frequency boost... It gnaws at your battery, and you can see the difference when you turn it off, battery lasts so much more. It is very poorly implemented, I don't think it's Dell's or any OEM's fault, it's probably Intel's, you can't have an i7 running on TurboBoost while you're reading an article on the web, it makes no sense.

I'm afraid the difference will become palpable in a few years, when the system is starting to age, and having the extra kick would make all the difference in the world when opening an app or whatever. Actually if your laptop can run at cool temperatures then it could even enable for several minutes giving exactly the extra juice you need. So I sincerely hope they will give us a working update one day.

We need to keep pressing Dell for a solution.

Yes, the toggling/untoggling bug shouldn't concern you at all, it's my understanding that it was brought in by some earlier update (probably the 2.2.0) and lingered on through later updates, but if your laptop shipped with a later BIOS version (I think the 3.0.3 was already enough) then you are safe.

The 3.3.0 seems to be stable, no issue so far, but no you are absolutely right, it didn't solve the blinking light problem. Unfortunately there's some misconception about the issue, to some degree it's normal for batteries to receive microbursts because it's also how a system checks on their status (charge and health), but in this case charges often last for several seconds (5-6-10 seconds, for how long TurboBoost is on), sometimes after a day of work the battery would gain a couple of %, and this can't be good... I'm obviously not an engineer or a physicist but connecting and disconnecting a battery hundreds of times per hour doesn't sound good, thousands of times during a work day.

Unfortunately Dell doesn't seem to care much because it seems to be affecting only a specific model, the 9310, and only the clamshell version. And you only notice it if you leave your laptop connected to the power cord. So I'm afraid there aren't many users lamenting the problem.

Btw, don't use Primarily AC Use as battery charging setting, it doesn't work... (and this affects pretty much any XPS, as far as I know). Keep using customs thresholds.