Hi,
I ended up sending my xps back, and getting a alien ware.
But the tech guy did manage to greatly improve the WiFi speeds. Although not fully.
It involved something along the lines of removing the back of the laptop, and moving the bit of the power cable that's near the WiFi card over, so its not so close. He also put some black insulator between them.
That increased the speeds from under 2mbps, to over 12mbps. But it still wasn't getting the speed I should have been getting (around 17mbps).
As for the battery life, have you enabled switchable graphics (it should come ore enabled)?.
I used to get around 3 hours of watching a 720p movie, or using visual studio, etc. But it depends what your doing.
Hope this helps.
Cheers
Corey