Dell 3543 i7 power/battery issue?

[Smurfatefrog]

I have a brand new Dell 3543 i7 with a weird problem....

If I boot it up with the power cable, no problem
If I boot it up with the power cable and then remove the cable and run on battery, no problem
If I boot it up on battery, it freezes after 2 or 3 minutes

Any ideas?
I'm going to take it back but would like to narrow the problem down if possible before I return it

 

[sajunky]

Update drivers. Some devices do not initialize correctly in power saving mode. What happen if you force "no power saving" when running on the battery? If problem goes away, then go back to the previous settings and disable drivers on-by-one and see when problem disappears. It will point you to the faulty driver.

 

[Smurfatefrog]

Thanks for the suggestion, but no luck, it still just hangs and eventually freezes.
My replacement does the same thing and so does a colleagues, so 3 of these laptops now with the same problem. It only seemed to start after we installed Windows 8.1

They are getting returned and we'll get something else rather!

 

[Rickster]

If it has that special dell bios you can try look at the battery health.

 

[Smurfatefrog]

If it has that special dell bios you can try look at the battery health.

Thanks, will check that out, I already had to go into the bios to change the function key setting!
But surely all 3 laptops cant have the same battery issue, once its booted up plugged in it works fine on battery after that. Even taking it out of sleep on battery kills it

 

[Rickster]

Should have installed windows 10.