Steerpike

I just got my XPS17 (9710) and really like the BIG SCREEN! I am especially pleased that the physical machine size is no bigger than my Samsung 15.6" laptop, so it will fit in my backpack. The new one is a bit heavier than my 15.6", which is a bummer, but it's not terribly heavy (I really wanted the LG Gram for this reason but could not cope with the 10-key / numeric keypad, or the glossy screen) I love the 'rubbery' feel of the inside keyboard surround (where your wrists rest). On my old laptop, this was cold, hard metal and was uncomfortable. I am a bit disappointed in the keyboard, though. I chose this laptop specifically because it did not have a '10-key' / numeric keypad on the right. But what I didn't realize is, they've even killed the single column of buttons that included 'Pg Up', 'Pg Dn', Home, End. I REALLY like having those dedicated keys. I see they are available as 'Fn' key options, so I'll just have to get used to that. I also REALLY don't like that they put the 'power' button where the 'delete' button is on 99.9% of keyboards. I instinctively reach for the top-right-most key for 'delete', so I'm going to have to re-learn that one. Also, I don't like the way the bottom row of keys (including the space bar) is almost right up against the keyboard surround, and the keys are sunken down to the point where I cannot 'feel' where the keys are, exactly. I find my thumb is hitting the 'surround' rather than the spacebar. Something else I'll no doubt get used to. At least it's not as difficult as switching to/from a Mac keyboard! I'm thrilled to have a laptop that has USB-C power, and will work with my universal docking station. The screen brightness is insane, if I set it to maximum! I mean, it's literally blinding when on full brightness! Should work well outside. And the screen is so 'flat'/matt (not mirrored / reflective at all). Note, I bought the FHD+ / non-touch on purpose for this reason. And I haven't heard the fans at all, other than when I first installed one-drive. Certainly when sitting at idle, and just random web browsing, or office product use, I hear absolutely nothing, which is great. So far, so good ...

Did some more digging, and this forum post worked for me, in terms of restoring the 'hibernate after ...' setting! Specifically, I opened the referenced registry key, and changed the already present DWORD from 0 to 2, rebooted, and now I can see 'hibernate after'. I'm going to set it to a short value and see if it works or not ...

Thanks for that tip! And once running, you can 'pin' it to the taskbar which I just did!

I just received my new Dell XPS 17 with Windows 11 Home. I guess I'm pleasantly surprised, so far. I've documented some specifics about 'modern standby' over in the Dell XPS forum, so I won't cover those here. First off, the initial setup felt very refined and quick. And I don't see too much annoying bloatware (yet) from Dell; they seem to be relying on windows drivers for key things like wireless adapters, which is refreshing (or at least, they aren't providing Dell-specific items in the 'tray' area). I did get tripped up by the whole 'Microsoft Account' thing. I've never logged in with one before, but decided to bite the bullet with this install, at least initially (I know I can create a local account once setup is complete, and then delete the MS Account, which I'll probably do soon). Since I have TWO MS Office 365 accounts, I figured I'd just use one of those as the 'MS Account'. However, windows rejected both of them. A bit of research revealed that the 'MS Account' that is required for Win 11 Home has to be a 'personal' MS Account, not a 'work' or 'business' MS Account. My two Office365 accounts are both 'business' class, and they are not compatible with win 11 Home login. So I reluctantly created a third, throw-away MS Account in order to log in. I then installed Office 365 (which required me to activate using my MS 'business' account). I then tried to get access to my 'OneDrive' files. This was a mess. OneDrive is already pre-installed in Win11, and it wants to 'authenticate' using the login MS Account. But I have 'OneDrive for Business', as part of my Office365 subscription. 'OneDrive for Business' is not the same as 'OneDrive' (something MS have never really resolved, branding-wise). I ultimately had to uninstall the pre-installed 'OneDrive', then locate the correct 'OneDrive for Business' setup file, which I eventually found but can't even remember where now - it was a hard thing to find. So now I have my 1TB of OneDrive files available. I long-ago accepted the idea of grouping documents on the taskbar (that is - one application entry on the taskbar, with multiple open documents revealing themselves when I hover over the entry), so this aspect of Win11 didn't bother me at all. I was pleasantly surprised to see all my 'recent documents' on my Win10 machine magically show up on the new laptop - without any action from me at all. This must have somehow synched through Office365 (since no other laptop of mine uses an 'MS Account'!). This is what I see on my new machine - all those 'recent' files were NEVER opened on this machine! I'll play around with it some more tonight and see if there's anything else worth noting ....

Just received my new XPS 17. Very nice :). I've decided to try using it 'as delivered' for now, to see how it goes, before making changes. To my surprise, without changing anything, I have 'advanced power options' available, and I'm in 'modern standby' mode. Specifically, I can go to control panel, power options, change plan settings, change advanced power settings - and there I see 'Processor Power Management', and I can set % values for both battery and plugged in. I may have misunderstood, but I thought these options were not available with modern standby. I was also able to enable Hibernate mode, and now have hibernate available as a power option along with sleep and shutdown. BUT - while I can still set a sleep time, I cannot find a way to specify a hibernate time - that is, I can say, 'sleep after 30 minutes' but I can't say 'hibernate after 4 hours' - which I have setup on my current system. So if I just let it go to sleep and ignore it, it will never transition to hibernate mode, which sucks.

Is the concept of RAMdisk still valid with SSD? I mean, I guess RAM is still faster than SSD by a fair margin, but ... does it really make any difference?

I don't know if my situation has a 'name' or not, but I've always been hyper-sensitive to noise. I prefer to drive in silence, only playing music if I really want to listen to something in particular. I find 'background music' to be totally distracting and makes me feel stressed. When I had desktop PCs at home, I went to great lengths to silencing them - underclocking, soundproofing, fan controls, etc! So you have disabled 'modern sleep', which re-enables advanced power options. Does this not also restore original 'S3' sleep, and if so, is there a reason you don't use S3 sleep when traveling? Or is S3 sleep completely gone now? I guess with BIOS support for it being removed, it's no longer an option under any circumstances. I can live with hibernate - it just takes a bit longer but such is life. Are these 'advanced power options' still reached through Control Panel / Power ...? Do you still get to say what happens on lid-close? Ironically I always used to set it to 'do nothing' anyway, and it sounds like that's what you've done. If 'modern sleep' worked flawlessly I may accept it - while I don't want or need windows to be waking all the time and updating things like emails, updates, etc if it 'just worked' I'd accept it, but my experience with even the more robust old 'S3' sleep was that certain unexpected events would wake up the laptop, and do so at the worst possible times, and not go back to sleep (it might have been some form of USB wake events triggering incorrectly). With windows being such an 'open' system, they can't easily control what rogue / incompetent 3rd parties do, and I can see all manner of problems arising. There's talk in that Reddit thread that laptops have caught fire due to this. Philosophically, it always bugged me that my Macs were constantly waking and checking for stuff. When I 'sleep' my laptop, I expect it to sleep! It's also interesting that you are able to stop your fans with max processor state of 99, while for me I had to use 70 before silence prevailed. In your case, it was just a matter of killing turbo, but for me, obviously, it was more. This of course could be due to my laptop being older (2014). Thanks for the details! I feel better now about my soon-to-arrive laptop!

Spinning this thread off from a discussion that started in the 'Windows' forum, since it's not specific to windows 11, and seems to be related to most modern laptop designs. This is the original post that triggered it - Have you upgraded to Windows 11? - Windows - NBR 3.1B (efgxt.net) Item #12, specifically (thanks to user Aaron44126). From that thread, context being advanced power management settings and the fact these advanced power management settings are largely gone if your laptop has what is called 'Modern standby'. Aaron44126 said This is the Reddit post - Getting back S3 sleep and disabling modern standby under Windows 10 >=2004 : Dell (reddit.com) I started reading the Reddit thread but it is very long, and it seems things have changed with various releases of windows, so hard to know what exactly is the situation 'today'. I'm hoping this thread could be a 'current state' discussion, perhaps specific to the XPS laptops with 11th gen Intel CPUs. I've been a long-time user of 'sleep'. I NEVER shut-down / restart my laptop unless forced to do so by updates (or crashes). I have dozens of apps / windows / tabs open all the time, and I just leave the laptop plugged in and 'on'. When I need to travel, I simply put the laptop to 'sleep' (which I believe is "S3 sleep"), and recover from sleep instantly at my destination. If I'm travelling for long enough (like a trip to Europe) the laptop may decide to go into 'hibernate' mode on its own to save battery. I will occasionally force Hibernate mode immediately (for example if I need to open up the case and replace a battery, or whatever). So ... what the hell is 'modern standby' and how does it differ from S3? The reddit article says "I was just tired of Dell and also Microsoft, both forcing you into Modern Standby, which never worked, doesn't work, and will not ever work reliable on Windows, compared to 100% working and reliable S3 (suspend to RAM) sleep." This MS article suggests it is all about 'instant on', and staying connected to the network while 'idle'. The article also says "Switching between S3 and Modern Standby cannot be done by changing a setting in the BIOS. Switching the power model is not supported in Windows without a complete OS re-install." - though this could be outdated by now. It also says "Microsoft conceptualizes modern sleep as equivalent to traditional S3 sleep, with the added benefit of allowing value-added software activities to run periodically." When I put my laptop to sleep, I expect it to stay dormant. I don't want it checking for email or doing anything. My laptop 'wakes' from 'sleep' almost instantly already, so I can't see the benefit of speeding this up! Even with good-old-fashioned S3 sleep, very rarely my laptop has decided to wake from sleep and this has been a disaster - I open my backpack to find my laptop red-hot from running without ventilation for hours! Hours of researching my 'event log' never uncovered the root cause of this. Is 'modern standby' going to make this worse? It seems they designed 'modern standby' for a machine sitting comfortably on your desk at home; not for a laptop with closed lid and stuffed into an insulating backpack! From Aaron44126's post, old-fashioned 'hibernate' is still an option if you disable 'modern standby', but S3 sleep is gone. Other than it taking a minute or more, it does the job quite well and is actually more reliable. Is 'hibernate' an option if you keep 'modern standby' in place?

Thanks for the detailed response! Regarding #12, it seems that's not win11 related so maybe it deserves another thread. I'll create one under the Dell XPS forum, as it seems there are Dell specifics in there. I'll post a link here when I'm done with it. (update - here it is ... XPS 17, 'Modern Standby', S3 sleep, and Windows 10/11 - XPS - NBR 3.1B (efgxt.net) Regarding #1, the taskbar ... I guess I'll have to get it and find out just how bad it is. Not being able to see the document names is going to be a killer for me (I tend to have many excel spreadsheets open at once, and having a thumbnail of each is pretty useless - I need the filename). This article suggests MS are making changes to the win11 taskbar ...

I guess I'll just have to get it and see whether I can live with it or not. I have a spare machine which I guess I could upgrade to W11 to check it out, but an upgrade won't necessarily behave the same as a clean install anyway. It's hard to know what I will 'miss' after using W10 for so long. Here's a list off the top of my head of things I could imagine could change ... perhaps if anyone has Win11 they could comment on whether the same functionality exists ... I have implemented the registry hack on W10 to restore Win7-like behavior of taskbar icons; I want one icon per app, and when I click the taskbar icon (assuming multiple documents are open for the app), I want a vertical stack of documents rather than the horizontal 'thumbnail peek' representation. Fixed in W10 by following this article - How do I change Taskbar icon preview from Thumbnail peek to List peek - Microsoft Community I presume task manager remains somewhat functionally unchanged; I keep task manager active all the time and keep an eye on the icon in the tray to see if anything is consuming unusual amounts of CPU. I use the task manager's 'startup' tab to disable most of the stuff I don't want to have running. I run things like Notepad using 'WinKey+R' to get the 'Run' dialog and type 'notepad'. I use Alt-tab all the time to switch between active tasks; For 'daily use' apps, like excel, I have their launch icon pinned to the taskbar. For less frequent tasks, I use the 'start' menu. I never did like the way win 10 handled the 'icons' on the right side of the 'start' menu, but I've learned to live with it and have placed my most common apps near the top for easy access. I do have a few sub-groups, which I read have gone away but as long as I can physically group things, I'll be OK. I've disabled cortana, and try to keep the task bar pretty clean. I don't use the 'desktop' much, but do place the occasional file or shortcut there for temporary quick access. I have avoided the 'Microsoft Store' like the plague and get all apps from the respective vendor. I use both Edge and Chrome, and set Google as my default search in both. I use IrfanView as my default jpg viewer; I use VideoLan as my default movie viewer; Foxit as my default PDF viewer. I'm used to having W10 occasionally reset these, but not too often. I login using a local account, not a Microsoft Account. I've already read that with win 11 home, you can't do this so I'm ready for that. I use the control panel 'power' app to reduce (throttle) CPU power to 70% for daily use - described here (Forum meta question - I really didn't want the link above to 'render' a preview of the page I linked to - I just wanted a simple URL paste for anyone to follow if they felt like it. It disturbs the flow of the list (so I put it at the end 🙂 ). I don't see any way to alter this behavior.

I just ordered a new Dell XPS that will ship with Win 11. Reading this thread, I'm beginning to have concerns as I'm quite comfortable with how Win 10 behaves, finally. I was a big fan of Windows 7, hated Vista and 8, and finally learned to live with win 10. Will I be able to downgrade to Win 10 or am I stuck with Win 11, being pre-installed?

What's the thinking behind 64GB RAM? Virtual Machines? Seems like a lot to me!

I just placed an order for the 9710! I ordered the most basic config available - i5, 8 GB RAM, 512 GB SSD, Windows Home; FHD+, UHD graphics. My plan is to replace RAM and add a 2 TB SSD. Delivery anticipated Feb 17 or before. Total cost with tax circa $1470. My first new laptop since 2015! I absolutely adore my Samsung NP930X5J 15.6" machine, so let's hope this Dell is as successful! The only reason I'm replacing it is the fixed RAM at 8 GB. I already installed a 2TB SSD and everything else is great.

That's very interesting - thanks! Do you have a good reference page that explains this in more detail? I had never noticed that 'slider' before in the power icon. I see that it's presented as a slider but it's really just a 3-position switch - low, medium, high. As soon as I slid it to the high setting, my fan kicked in! Is it your experience that it's not the max power state per se that is triggering the fan, but rather the turbo boost? Back when I first discovered this trick, I tried setting max processor state to 95, 90, 85, 80, 75, 70%. It wasn't until I hit 70% that I found the fan would be pretty much silent all the time, so that would suggest setting 99% wouldn't cut it for me. But regardless - now that I know about the slider, it seems like I can essentially toggle the setting on and off much easier; I won't need to go to the advanced power options applet just to override the limit. There are times when I'd like to speed things up just momentarily and don't bother due to the number of steps I have to go through.

With your new XPS 9710, does the fan ever kick in while the machine is idle? I tend to be a bit obsessive about fan noise, and I always have task manager active so I can see the little 'performance bar' in the tray area, to correlate CPU activity and fan noise. What I've noticed over the years is, even background tasks (eg, search indexing, and probably hundreds of other 'housekeeping' tasks that windows decides to do) will increase CPU enough to trigger the fan. For the past several years I've addressed this by throttling the CPU at 70%; at 70%, the fan never kicks in unless I'm doing something really serious. On the VERY few occasions I actually need a lot of horsepower (video encoding, etc) I restore it to 100%. (For reference - control panel / power options / change plan settings / change advanced power settings / Processor power management / Maximum processor state - 70% (for battery and plugged in).

Since you don't use the touchpad much, though, do you have that setting enabled that blocks out the touchpad when mouse is connected? That may explain why you aren't seeing misfires? The trackpad misfire issue is one big reason I don't want a laptop with numeric keypad; the kepyad pushes the 'main' keyboard off to the left, which then means your hands are off-center to the left. Some designs keep the trackpad in the middle, which is crazy as mis-fires are going to occur even more. Others skew the trackpad to the left, which looks bizarre, and is still awkward.

Speaking of the touchpad ... how is it? I've had terrible ones on some laptops! misfires, palm fires, etc. I used to find that synaptics made great ones, alps made bad ones, but that may be different now. I often use the laptop on my lap so a mouse is not always an option. In all honesty, I could live quite happily with my current 2014 Samsung NP930X5J in terms of processor speed; I even throttle it down most of the time to keep the fan from running (I hate fan noise!) by setting max processor power to 70% in power options! But the 8 Gig fixed RAM is killing me as I open up to a hundred browser tabs at a time, plus excel, word, outlook, etc. It still limps along fine but 16 Gig would really help. My current 2TB SSD is SATA, so any modern SSD is going to be better. A 17" screen will be a slight improvement over my current 15.6", especially in the same footprint. Only the extra weight of the 9710 is a negative, but I don't travel as much as I used to.

Does anyone have any advanced information about what changes may be coming to the XPS 17 in the latest 9720 iteration, other than the obvious new intel processor? I'm about to buy the 9710 but someone suggested I should wait for the 9720. My requirements are: FHD display (1920x ...), non-touch (to keep it light); non-glossy surface Integrated Intel graphics (to keep power / battery life / fan noise to a minimum) No numeric keypad (I don't like how the numeric keypad forces the main section off-center to the left) 2nd SSD slot (so I can install a 2TB stick), replaceable RAM (or 16 GB built-in). Light-weight. I wish the XPS 97x0 were lighter, (like the LG Gram) but it checks all the other boxes so I think I'm willing to put up with the weight.