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by gotstad 1722 days ago
I will never buy a Dell XPS laptop again. The exterior build quality seems very good, but the internals are such a mess.

I cannot count how many times I have been biking home from work and heard in my headphones "Two devices connected", realizing that my Dell XPS had woken up and would - once again - be red hot when I arrived home and pulled it out of my bag.

5 comments

Just curious, why would you keep putting the standby laptop in your backpack after this had occurred more than once? It sounds like hardware russian roulette.
Same experience. I can't understand how a company like Dell isn't capable of avoiding such design mistakes with their laptop line.
I've had three generations of the XPS 13. The first I had had a few issues, but fixable. (Even though I agree, this shouldn't even have occurred) The second one was flawless. The last one was worse than the first and it's my last.

I've set my sights on Lenovo now. X1 Carbon is supposed to be really good for Linux and you can buy it with Ubuntu or no OS installed.

I returned my X1 Carbon due to unsolvable audio latency/jitter issues on Windows. Out of the box, just watching YouTube was impossible.
The Carbon had its share of issues

https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/ThinkPad-X-Series-Laptops/Lenov...

The latest BIOS supposedly fixes most of them

I hate x1 carbons with windows. The t series has been much better but I think carbones are ok with ubuntu.
I bike to work with a dell xps 9343 and don't have any more problems with it waking from sleep unexpectedly. powercfg -lastwake and powercfg -waketimers can show what is causing the computer to wake up, and you can disable some of the modern standby settings like wake words with cortana or bluetooth. The same thing can happen with any other laptop, the default intel/microsoft settings leave a lot of possibilities and I have run into a similar issue with an X1 and a t580.
This is unrelated, but do you find that you lose your sense of awareness when cycling with headphones in? I can see the appeal in a rural road or otherwise less busy area, but in downtown Toronto, you'll die if you do it.

Even on country roads, occasionally cars (and cyclists!) will pass to close, and one errant swerve will end in disaster.

I forget which country it was, but they had a national campaign (including radio ads and one pop song) that encouraged cyclists to ride with only one earbud inserted.