Dell M3800 battery failures

My office has been getting a few M3800's over the last year. We have maybe 5 or 6 so far. The batteries keep failing on about half. 1 of the units had a motherboard unit fail on it twice (including replacement). Another had a motherboard failure, and 3 have had complete battery failures. Since they're under warranty, dell has been quick to fix but it seems like bandaids on an open wound.

Anyone else experiencing similar issues? Reliability is so bad that our IT dept doesn't want to buy anymore.

 

Nobody has had any problems?

 

As far as I can tell, there's been no reports of widespread issues with these machines of the sort you describe.

 

Well it seems like I'm not alone on the Dell community forums. Other individuals are reporting a high failure rate for the M3800 (about 30-40% of units). Batteries and motherboards specifically. Our replacement batteries are now failing too. I am only getting about 90 minutes of use out of a 91Wh. I bought mine a little over a year ago. Its too bad, I really liked the machine but our IT dept refuses to buy any more. I can't trust the machine while away on business trips so it will need to be replaced with something else.

 

Have you done things such as check that there is not excessive CPU use? A tool like BatteryBarPro is useful to check the battery wear etc. Mine idles (with CPU use at around 2%) and mid-brightness at around 11W which equates to about 8 hours use on the 91Wh.

 

No, I haven't tried any tools to measure battery consumption. Even so, that doesn't explain why half of the batteries in our office's computers have failed in less than a year.. By failing I mean warning messages and the computer not able to be used off of AC power. Total failure. We have them set up with dual monitors and a USB hub. They are always plugged in except for while on travel. The replacement batteries are maxing out at 2 hrs after a month of use. Totally unacceptable and that's with general web browsing, mapping software, and using MS office. No videos.

 

I'm going to go out on a limb here and attribute this to the fact that the M3800 is basically a rebadged XPS 15 with different drivers for the GPU.

In my experience, consumer laptops simply don't last as long as a proper 'enterprise' level equivalent.

 

Maybe the express charge "feature" is the culprit here. Its a known fact it kills battery faster and for the love of god i eo not know why dell has it on by default on some machines.

Sent from my C1905 using Tapatalk

 

If they're always plugged in, I've would recommend setting in BIOS the battery setting to AC, or to a custom setting where it's max charge is less than 100%. Task manager or a battery program such as I suggested would indicate whether it's a software problem (high CPU use) rather than a hardware problem. I don't know about any express charge feature but the battery wear on my XPS15 is 3% after over a year's solid usage, and so is holding up very well.