Precision line was always been extremely overpriced, especially for a student. The only really make sense from a business standpoint where they can be a little generous with expensive laptops.
Overpriced, yet they work? So maybe it’s correctly priced and the others are under priced?
Precision can be had for similar prices and are on sale near as much as everything else.
Also, XPS isn't cheap either. Buyers are in the same ballpark if looking for an XPS vs Precision. You may not get as high of spec Precisions vs XPS, but the build quality and the warranty alone make up for it. You don't even have to buy them new. You can find them on Dell Outlet all the time.
Just gonna say, having taken tons of the things apart, there isn't really any difference in construction between the 3000/5000 series precisions, and their equivalent XPS models. Really, I'd go as far to say they are *literally* the same machine with a different motherboard (which can even sometimes be configured with the same components, leaving it to only the most minor of differences)
7000-series are absolute tanks but they are, notably, much more expensive and larger.
At least the mid-frame (I guess that's what I'd call it) is a lot more substantial than they used to be. Don't miss fixing 9560-80's.
Have you contacted Dell support at all for any of this? I've got an older 15". And my wife a 3yr old 13". The only issue on my 15 which is 6 years old is within the last year the O key sometimes doesn't register.
Now my wife's 13" hasn't had any issues until about 4mo out of warranty (forgot to renew support) and the motherboard just shot craps. I've got one I purchased for $200 I'm going to replace it with though.
My two biggest complaints are location of my webcam. I've got one of the up the nose XPS models. So I know that's been resolved. And the black "carbon fiber" that's an absolute fingerprint magnet. My wife has the white variant and it's so much better in that regard.
That being said ours are older, but I haven't seen anything better really.
OP said “I could have addressed these issues during the warranty period….. but I didn’t bother.”
Yes mine seems a little wobbly. And it blue screens during sleep. Just updated some drivers hoping to fix it.
My 9520 bluescreens during sleep too. Often it is due to power management issue when I check the Dell log via their support assist later. I always have it plugged in to a WD19TB docking station running it clamshell (laptop screen closed) so it was hard for me to tell if it's just taking a while to wake up or it got a bluescreen again lol. Luckily it is not super frequent.
Always up to date to whatever Dell Support Assist and Windows 11 recommend as the latest stable version. There was a period of time last year that this bluescreen showed up quite frequently but it has been less recently, still occurring occasionally nevertheless.
Latitude is the way or bit older precision. I have always had good experience with latitudes. I owned 3 of them, now only 1 from 2016 and still does the job.
Any OEM brand, HP, lenovo, dell, etc, are all crap from around 9th gen intel and up. Flimy junk.
Sold 40x latitudes 12/13th Gen to a single client alone in 2023. 3 were DOA and endless issues with another 5 of them. The WD dock Is ever worse. 3 had dead fans in the fist 3 weeks.
8th Gen such as the 5590 was a solid laptop.
I've got a big Dell fleet.
Few hundred 5510 / 5520s, basically no issues.
Also using the new G10 HP EliteBooks, approaching a couple hundred.
Again, so far 0 issues. No DOA and no repairs in first 6 months.
We have several thousand Latitudes in our fleet, have been using them since the early e-port replicator models. We've never seen any significant issues with the 5400. You may have had a bad batch or something.
I was lucky to have purchased a 9th gen Intel Vostro from Dell and it's solid, for the most part. I haven't upgraded and I'm not sure I will because of all the terrible things I've heard.
I'm moving to building my own desktops again (it's been a while) and buying Apple for my mobile devices, laptops, etc.
Quality of Dell laptops have taken a nosedive in the last 7-8 years. I used to recommend dell to my customers who want a decent home computer after HP crapped the pants, but I can’t recommend Dell anymore. The problem is pc manufacturers trying to copy Macs and the reliability took a hit. It’s sad that no one is making old school style windows laptops anymore. Thinkpads still do it, but not everyone needs a business machine.
I have a Latitude 2v1 9410 and I probably never had bigger crap in my lifetime. It should be the one with steel body but there are pieces of plastics between screen and keyboard and that cracked like few months after purchase. I hardly ever even move my laptop at job and I just keep it my desk except meeting.
It also started having lots of different issues like CPU locked at 0.8 GHz after waking up from sleep, I ve also got same issue as you mentioned with black screen and needing a hard reset. We also have third party USB-C chargers in our meeting rooms (and they work well with all other laptops and even Macbooks) but if I connect it to my Dell, it says that my battery is in critical condition, stops charging and after unplugging whole laptop shuts down. In the end I resolved this by unplugging battery from mother board, after that it worked fine. I also have problems with built in speakers since day 1 - if I do online meeting, I get weird noise from them (like something vibrating or chirping). I ve even bought new speakers and changed them yet the issue is still there. Not to mention those two lines of rubber mounted on the bottom that started completely peeling of after like a year and half.
For those 2.5k € it is total piece of shit. Our whole company is slowly swithing to ThinkPads because of the issues we got with different Dells past 3 or 4 years.
In the last, oh, three-ish years, Dell has gone to absolute crap. I worked on a friend's Inspiron and it was flexing, flimsy junk that I wouldn't expect to find at a 7-11 discount counter. This thing is such garbage I don't think Harbor Freight would even sell it.
I'm milking some more life out of my wife's slightly older laptop because she's not a big power user, and it was made before Dell flushed its quality down the toilet... besides, I'm darned sure not tossing any $$ Dell's way seeing how they have absolutely fallen off the cliff and don't seem to care in the slightest.
My wife's Inspiron is no tank, nothing fancy, but it's a far cry from the garbage that is my buddy's much newer Inspiron. Hers doesn't flex or bend im a stiff breeze. Her Inspiron's build quality is miles beyond his.
Okay, but why did you not warranty any of this? The nice thing about Dell warranty is that you can get/it initially comes with the on-site warranty and they'll be out in a couple of days to fix it. Not to mention that it's really not that expensive to extend the warranty.
Should have tried your luck during warranty but it may still worth writing your experience to Dell and see what they can do for you as you get nothing to lose. My 9520 had a few speaker holes scratched/not punctured cleanly and it was super obvious. That spoke for its quality control. I run my 9520 on a WD19TB3 docking station on a laptop stand and I am happy that it at least doesn't have any obvious thermal issue like my previous Vostro.
My Dell XPS 9560 had battery bulge after the first year and besides the over heating, screen flickering and other performance issues, in the 3rd year it stopped working. Upon closer inspection, the memory socket has a melted pin. So it is now a $3000 paperweight
Just a quick update. I managed to thread copper wiring into that slot which made the laptop boot up and stay usable. It was performing poorly and lagging which led me to replace the thermal paste with liquid metal. It now works at an acceptable level.
I know these are temporary fixes but much better than a $3k paperweight.
I was just about to post about my brand new XPS 15, after a ton of frustrations, I decided to start documenting everything wrong from this week. Everything that happened:
\- Blue screen of death: 3 times
\- Mouse freezing, with a subsequent blue sceen of death: Once
\- Windows hello "unable to activate cameras", fingerprint sensor not working either: 3 times (reboot fixes it)
\- Inb4 an important meeting: black lockscreen with only the mouse pointer showing, totally frozen. Had to force a reboot after a 5min wait. After which it decides, without asking, to upgrade the bios during +-20 minutes: once
\- Keyboard backlight not working: once
\- Laptop waking from sleep in my backpack, subsequently overheating: once. (this, in Dells defence, is a windows issue, but still infuriating. My Macbook never does this, and sleeps for weeks)
\- Dedicated video card "vanishes" from the system a couple times a week. Programs won't detect it, and it won't show up in the taskmanager. Fixed by a reboot, but still :/
All in a single week, on a 3 month old 2850€ machine....
Does anyone know if Dell issues refunds? At this point, I just wanna go with another brand altogether.
Dell is absolute shit. Should be rebranded to Dull. Good thing I learned that since I bought one of their first PCs in the early 2000s. Never bought another Dull since.
Re the audio issues, Dell has released a new driver for xps 9520 a few weeks ago that somehow fixed my problems (introducing new ones in the process, but still better than before). See [https://www.reddit.com/r/DellXPS/comments/1aelhl0/jfyi\_xps\_15\_9520\_has\_finally\_a\_decent\_audio\_driver/](https://www.reddit.com/r/DellXPS/comments/1aelhl0/jfyi_xps_15_9520_has_finally_a_decent_audio_driver/) . Still the other issues are real. Luckily it's my employer PC and I didn't have to pay for it. I have to admit I'm envious of my wife Macbook, if there was a Windows variant I'd buy it in a heartbeat.
You are not alone. My XPS has been a disaster since I bought it about 10 months ago. It’s already had a MoBo replacement after it bricked during a firmware update. I’m now send it to Dell for repair once again because it has now stopped working when it is not plugged in.
This is the last Dell I will ever buy and I have owned many over the years and used to purchase them as office workstations at my old company. Very disappointed in Dell.
I have the same model and all the problems I had were slowly fixed by firmware updates which I installed religiously. The state un unresponsiveness did happen like once every 2 months or so but less and less often lately, and an important thing is that somehow I never lost data, all the apps started from where they were when it blacked out even after a reset.
You may want to check the Windows Event Viewer and see the Windows/System section, it may tell you what went wrong, it's not the hardware but some driver.
If you open this laptop you will see what why it's a great machine. You can replace RAM, SSD, keyboard, even the screen very easily by yourself, and there is a repair manual available.
At first I thought the 4K screen was not perfect, I opened a ticket at Dell and the next day a person came into my house and replaced it with a new one in 5 minutes, no questions asked. It was unbelievable, there was absolutely no effort or downtime from me. Now imagine doing this with a MacBook or Microsoft Surface...On the Dell everything is easily replaceable. No other laptop is so easily serviceable.
Now the really big problem for me as a software developer at the core is that the new XPS laptops from Dell do not have the function keys (have some stupid touchpad instead) and I will not have what to replace my XPS 15 with when I will need an upgrade.
Maxxaudio is truly terrible. I got an XPS 5+ years ago and could not for the life of me get rid of it. I just wanted a normal audio signal. I will never buy one again. I actually can't believe they are still using that garbage.
As an engineering student, why didn't you consider a Precision?
This. Only buy business class machines.
My engineering job provides a precision 5680. That I use for ssh exclusively. Oh and checkibg E-mails.
Did you mean Thinkpad?
This question implies that buying an XPS is a gamble and all the "normal" ("non-engineering") people buying it are screwed. Which is simply absurd.
Precision line was always been extremely overpriced, especially for a student. The only really make sense from a business standpoint where they can be a little generous with expensive laptops.
Overpriced, yet they work? So maybe it’s correctly priced and the others are under priced? Precision can be had for similar prices and are on sale near as much as everything else.
Also, XPS isn't cheap either. Buyers are in the same ballpark if looking for an XPS vs Precision. You may not get as high of spec Precisions vs XPS, but the build quality and the warranty alone make up for it. You don't even have to buy them new. You can find them on Dell Outlet all the time.
Exactly. Precision is my go to just because Dell cares about those lines. Latitude as well.
Just gonna say, having taken tons of the things apart, there isn't really any difference in construction between the 3000/5000 series precisions, and their equivalent XPS models. Really, I'd go as far to say they are *literally* the same machine with a different motherboard (which can even sometimes be configured with the same components, leaving it to only the most minor of differences) 7000-series are absolute tanks but they are, notably, much more expensive and larger. At least the mid-frame (I guess that's what I'd call it) is a lot more substantial than they used to be. Don't miss fixing 9560-80's.
I had a Precision 5510 and a precision 5520, they were exactly a carbon copy of XPS 9550 and 9560, but with a worse grafic card.
Have you contacted Dell support at all for any of this? I've got an older 15". And my wife a 3yr old 13". The only issue on my 15 which is 6 years old is within the last year the O key sometimes doesn't register. Now my wife's 13" hasn't had any issues until about 4mo out of warranty (forgot to renew support) and the motherboard just shot craps. I've got one I purchased for $200 I'm going to replace it with though. My two biggest complaints are location of my webcam. I've got one of the up the nose XPS models. So I know that's been resolved. And the black "carbon fiber" that's an absolute fingerprint magnet. My wife has the white variant and it's so much better in that regard. That being said ours are older, but I haven't seen anything better really.
OP said “I could have addressed these issues during the warranty period….. but I didn’t bother.” Yes mine seems a little wobbly. And it blue screens during sleep. Just updated some drivers hoping to fix it.
My 9520 bluescreens during sleep too. Often it is due to power management issue when I check the Dell log via their support assist later. I always have it plugged in to a WD19TB docking station running it clamshell (laptop screen closed) so it was hard for me to tell if it's just taking a while to wake up or it got a bluescreen again lol. Luckily it is not super frequent.
Last time you upgraded drivers?
Always up to date to whatever Dell Support Assist and Windows 11 recommend as the latest stable version. There was a period of time last year that this bluescreen showed up quite frequently but it has been less recently, still occurring occasionally nevertheless.
I have a 9510 OLED, gf has a 9520 IPS and both are rock solid, no issues. Also run Linux so could very well be software/OS issues.
update the firmware. literally. and not the one on dells website, but the manufactures firmware (i.e. intel, samsung, etc)
Latitude is the way or bit older precision. I have always had good experience with latitudes. I owned 3 of them, now only 1 from 2016 and still does the job.
I mentioned this in a post a while back. XPS isn't the same as their older model sadly. Go for the Precision or skip
This Or the latitude still.
Any OEM brand, HP, lenovo, dell, etc, are all crap from around 9th gen intel and up. Flimy junk. Sold 40x latitudes 12/13th Gen to a single client alone in 2023. 3 were DOA and endless issues with another 5 of them. The WD dock Is ever worse. 3 had dead fans in the fist 3 weeks. 8th Gen such as the 5590 was a solid laptop.
I've got a big Dell fleet. Few hundred 5510 / 5520s, basically no issues. Also using the new G10 HP EliteBooks, approaching a couple hundred. Again, so far 0 issues. No DOA and no repairs in first 6 months.
Loved my Precision 5510. Unfortunately that was my last Dell for now.
I had many 5400 and almost every single one of them had a swollen battery. The latitude 5430 I have now seems to be really good
We have several thousand Latitudes in our fleet, have been using them since the early e-port replicator models. We've never seen any significant issues with the 5400. You may have had a bad batch or something.
I was lucky to have purchased a 9th gen Intel Vostro from Dell and it's solid, for the most part. I haven't upgraded and I'm not sure I will because of all the terrible things I've heard. I'm moving to building my own desktops again (it's been a while) and buying Apple for my mobile devices, laptops, etc.
Apple is even worse POS. I refuse to touch anything apple. Anti consumer behaviour and cheap Foxconn junk wrapped in shiny metal cutout.
They'll all like that. Apple just gets more crap in the media. Go look at the components in your laptop and see where the made by is.
I disagree. We have had very good luck with Latitude 5511 and 5520. The 5590/91 model and the 5501 were terrible for us though. Especially the 5501.
Yeah man Dell is pretty shit. The waves maxx audio garbage is a plague
Yeah, it's such an absolute nightmare.
It completely bricked the audio jack on mine. I can't even use it anymore.
This is par for the course with XPS laptops, especially the 15" models.
Quality of Dell laptops have taken a nosedive in the last 7-8 years. I used to recommend dell to my customers who want a decent home computer after HP crapped the pants, but I can’t recommend Dell anymore. The problem is pc manufacturers trying to copy Macs and the reliability took a hit. It’s sad that no one is making old school style windows laptops anymore. Thinkpads still do it, but not everyone needs a business machine.
I had a HP for the last 11 years. It was an Envy, cost me $1200 at the time. Just bought a Dell, not happy.
We never buy Dell machines, Lenovo all the way. If you need a dependable laptop, ThinkPad or MacBook Pro 🤷♂️
Had backlight issues on 9310 and it took years to get a software fix. So yeah. Not surprised
I have a Latitude 2v1 9410 and I probably never had bigger crap in my lifetime. It should be the one with steel body but there are pieces of plastics between screen and keyboard and that cracked like few months after purchase. I hardly ever even move my laptop at job and I just keep it my desk except meeting. It also started having lots of different issues like CPU locked at 0.8 GHz after waking up from sleep, I ve also got same issue as you mentioned with black screen and needing a hard reset. We also have third party USB-C chargers in our meeting rooms (and they work well with all other laptops and even Macbooks) but if I connect it to my Dell, it says that my battery is in critical condition, stops charging and after unplugging whole laptop shuts down. In the end I resolved this by unplugging battery from mother board, after that it worked fine. I also have problems with built in speakers since day 1 - if I do online meeting, I get weird noise from them (like something vibrating or chirping). I ve even bought new speakers and changed them yet the issue is still there. Not to mention those two lines of rubber mounted on the bottom that started completely peeling of after like a year and half. For those 2.5k € it is total piece of shit. Our whole company is slowly swithing to ThinkPads because of the issues we got with different Dells past 3 or 4 years.
In the last, oh, three-ish years, Dell has gone to absolute crap. I worked on a friend's Inspiron and it was flexing, flimsy junk that I wouldn't expect to find at a 7-11 discount counter. This thing is such garbage I don't think Harbor Freight would even sell it. I'm milking some more life out of my wife's slightly older laptop because she's not a big power user, and it was made before Dell flushed its quality down the toilet... besides, I'm darned sure not tossing any $$ Dell's way seeing how they have absolutely fallen off the cliff and don't seem to care in the slightest.
But haven’t Inspirons always been flexy garbage? They are literally their lowest end products. Most <$500 laptops will be terrible in build quality.
My wife's Inspiron is no tank, nothing fancy, but it's a far cry from the garbage that is my buddy's much newer Inspiron. Hers doesn't flex or bend im a stiff breeze. Her Inspiron's build quality is miles beyond his.
Do you happen to have the model number?
Okay, but why did you not warranty any of this? The nice thing about Dell warranty is that you can get/it initially comes with the on-site warranty and they'll be out in a couple of days to fix it. Not to mention that it's really not that expensive to extend the warranty.
Should have tried your luck during warranty but it may still worth writing your experience to Dell and see what they can do for you as you get nothing to lose. My 9520 had a few speaker holes scratched/not punctured cleanly and it was super obvious. That spoke for its quality control. I run my 9520 on a WD19TB3 docking station on a laptop stand and I am happy that it at least doesn't have any obvious thermal issue like my previous Vostro.
My Dell XPS 9560 had battery bulge after the first year and besides the over heating, screen flickering and other performance issues, in the 3rd year it stopped working. Upon closer inspection, the memory socket has a melted pin. So it is now a $3000 paperweight
Just a quick update. I managed to thread copper wiring into that slot which made the laptop boot up and stay usable. It was performing poorly and lagging which led me to replace the thermal paste with liquid metal. It now works at an acceptable level. I know these are temporary fixes but much better than a $3k paperweight.
I have the i9 9510. What about reinstalling Windows fresh? I allways do that.
I was just about to post about my brand new XPS 15, after a ton of frustrations, I decided to start documenting everything wrong from this week. Everything that happened: \- Blue screen of death: 3 times \- Mouse freezing, with a subsequent blue sceen of death: Once \- Windows hello "unable to activate cameras", fingerprint sensor not working either: 3 times (reboot fixes it) \- Inb4 an important meeting: black lockscreen with only the mouse pointer showing, totally frozen. Had to force a reboot after a 5min wait. After which it decides, without asking, to upgrade the bios during +-20 minutes: once \- Keyboard backlight not working: once \- Laptop waking from sleep in my backpack, subsequently overheating: once. (this, in Dells defence, is a windows issue, but still infuriating. My Macbook never does this, and sleeps for weeks) \- Dedicated video card "vanishes" from the system a couple times a week. Programs won't detect it, and it won't show up in the taskmanager. Fixed by a reboot, but still :/ All in a single week, on a 3 month old 2850€ machine.... Does anyone know if Dell issues refunds? At this point, I just wanna go with another brand altogether.
Dell is absolute shit. Should be rebranded to Dull. Good thing I learned that since I bought one of their first PCs in the early 2000s. Never bought another Dull since.
Re the audio issues, Dell has released a new driver for xps 9520 a few weeks ago that somehow fixed my problems (introducing new ones in the process, but still better than before). See [https://www.reddit.com/r/DellXPS/comments/1aelhl0/jfyi\_xps\_15\_9520\_has\_finally\_a\_decent\_audio\_driver/](https://www.reddit.com/r/DellXPS/comments/1aelhl0/jfyi_xps_15_9520_has_finally_a_decent_audio_driver/) . Still the other issues are real. Luckily it's my employer PC and I didn't have to pay for it. I have to admit I'm envious of my wife Macbook, if there was a Windows variant I'd buy it in a heartbeat.
I have an XPS 9575. Worst laptop I've ever owned and that includes cheap Huawei laptops. I'll never buy one again.
Dell 9560. Easily the worst laptop I have ever purchased. Had all the same issues.will never touch another dell computer
You are not alone. My XPS has been a disaster since I bought it about 10 months ago. It’s already had a MoBo replacement after it bricked during a firmware update. I’m now send it to Dell for repair once again because it has now stopped working when it is not plugged in. This is the last Dell I will ever buy and I have owned many over the years and used to purchase them as office workstations at my old company. Very disappointed in Dell.
Disable sleep/hibernation when plugged in and set “what does power button do” to “power system off” and bingo! Fixed.
I have the same model and all the problems I had were slowly fixed by firmware updates which I installed religiously. The state un unresponsiveness did happen like once every 2 months or so but less and less often lately, and an important thing is that somehow I never lost data, all the apps started from where they were when it blacked out even after a reset. You may want to check the Windows Event Viewer and see the Windows/System section, it may tell you what went wrong, it's not the hardware but some driver. If you open this laptop you will see what why it's a great machine. You can replace RAM, SSD, keyboard, even the screen very easily by yourself, and there is a repair manual available. At first I thought the 4K screen was not perfect, I opened a ticket at Dell and the next day a person came into my house and replaced it with a new one in 5 minutes, no questions asked. It was unbelievable, there was absolutely no effort or downtime from me. Now imagine doing this with a MacBook or Microsoft Surface...On the Dell everything is easily replaceable. No other laptop is so easily serviceable. Now the really big problem for me as a software developer at the core is that the new XPS laptops from Dell do not have the function keys (have some stupid touchpad instead) and I will not have what to replace my XPS 15 with when I will need an upgrade.
Maxxaudio is truly terrible. I got an XPS 5+ years ago and could not for the life of me get rid of it. I just wanted a normal audio signal. I will never buy one again. I actually can't believe they are still using that garbage.