XPS 13 9340, new, overall disappointment

Question

I have a relatively recent XPS 13 that I love, but replaced because it was gently bent in a bike accident. I still hope to fix it because I'd like to go back to it. So what's wrong with the 9340? Below is my list, and I'd be curious to know if anyone has extra advice to increase my happiness.

First the good. It is a beautiful looking machine. It is light, and it is fast.

Here are my list of annoyances.

The capacitive keys! What a bad idea. I read the reviews and though that perhaps it would be fine. Really, it is not fine. I could probably live with most of the row being capacitive, but ESC and delete are such important keys. And you need to be careful how you press them. Trying to delete a single slide in a pptx presentation, a light touch on the delete key decided to nuke half my slide deck. Sure, just undo, but why am I even dealing with this in the first place!
I swear the machine is slow to boot. Perhaps it is the secure BIOS? If anyone has advice, I'm happy to hear. I'll do a race between my old XPS and this one at some point to see if I'm imagining it.
The track pad has a wonderful feel to it, but where is the edge? I've been using this machine for months now, and still have my hand drift to the region where my gestures don't work as intended. Likewise, I'll mention having to go through some bad malfunctions that have mostly gone away after a driver update. Perhaps I should simply put a piece of tape on the edge of the region to give myself a tactile guide.
The screen is pretty nice, but by default way too saturated. Fortunately this can be tuned in the intel graphics command center. That said, I'm still sad that it is only 3K instead of 4K.

John_72bfd28 · Answer

I have a XPS 14 9440 and largely share your frustration.

I got this as a replacement for a 6 year old laptop that could no longer process my photos with the increasing graphics chip power needed to do that. I have never had such a poor laptop/PC. As said it is very slow to boot and as bad to reboot.

I have endless problems, this morning yet again it froze with a “Chipset catastrophic error signal” cleared by holding the power down for 20seconds. This has happened many times! Run hardware test and nothing comes up as having an error.

I leave in in sleep and the reliability history is mind-blowingly bad with crashes to do with Dell and Intel Killer programs. A technician to me its normal when sleeping, given how slow booting and clearly laptops are no geared to be used in sleep why don’t they get there programs to work in it?

Many processes its no faster than my old laptop, which is frustrating. As for the comparison to my 4-year-old desk PC, about 1/3 the speed! I know laptops are slower than desk ones but really you run a virus check and the desk has 2 drives of 2Tb and a 4Tb one filled with photos. The laptop has a 1 Tb with just the last years photos and it takes v=well over 2 hours to do it and the desk under an hour. The only thing is it can fully process my images when away with its NVIDIA chip!

The capacitive keys I read other makers had tried and abandoned them and like you I see why they did,. Basically a really stupid idea that others have abandoned so why on earth did Dell use them?

The track pad is no problem, I don’t use it at all.

Over all the reviews were all very good for XPS 14 9440 it makes me wonder if they were genuine what on earth other laptops are like now as the XPS 14 9440 is not very good and slow and unreliable.

John_72bfd28 · Answer

I would add support is mixed at best. My first contact went very well. Since then, latterly a Dell program bug locked me out of my account, was difficult to say the least. I have hearing problems, and my wife has to act as me ears. She really lost her cool with the last one who just would.]t stop repeating the same things and stopped her from telling me. It’s a communication problem at times, we are 80 and someone refusing to listen to what is being asked of them gets a bit annoying! But with my old laptop over 5 years and no need for support, what a difference!

XPS

XPS 13 9340, new, overall disappointment

Was this post helpful?