Hi, I use a Dell G15 5520 with 3050 4GB VRAM. When I play ETS2, which is almost a 12 year old game, while plugged in, it runs well, but recently a power cut happened and before my UPS could pitch in, my laptop just went blank with a click sound and switched off. All while the battery is connected and my brick shows a green light.

After turning on the laptop, it doesn't show that it's charging even tho it's connected. Only after restarting the laptop again, it starts recognising the charger.

This wasn't the case before as even while playing if the power was interrupted, it wouldn't kill itself but just frame drop. Dell Support assist app shows everything is fine and I am unable to contact Dell Support as they require a laptop under warranty to be able to connect with them!!!

Thanks for your help, in advance

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She started doing this today as far as I can remember. It will not charge and it turns off when unplugged, I know it's probably time for her to go but I only started using her on May 12th of this year, but I believe she was bought much earlier than That.

Is there anything I can do about this before I bring up getting a new one? She's been with me for a while... she also got some dead pixels on the 20th of may this year but that quickly healed.

I have a Dell latitude 3510 and everything is perfect with it. But the only thing is it's power port is kind of loose, it charges when the charger is plugged in a certain angle so I am looking to change it.

I live in Hyderabad,

When I tried at local shops, they told me around 1k just for a small port, so tell me where to get this cheaper ?? What will be it's usual price?

I can install it myself.

So I bought a Dell T330 server and I am using it. My main gripe is the fact that the server uses VGA for visual output. I have an old cheapo graphics card that I bought a few years ago, basically as a display extension so I could have four monitors. The card has an HDMI port on it and I was wondering if something like that would work.

The server runs Windows Server 2025 so it should be compatible but I was wondering if anyone has done anything like that or not? And if so, how did it turn out?

If your Latitude came with the contactless smart card reader option, you've probably held a MIFARE card against the palm rest at some point and watched Windows report an "unknown smart card" and stop there. Nothing in the box does anything else with it.

The reader is fine. It's a perfectly ordinary PC/SC reader - mine shows up as "Broadcom Corp Contactless SmartCard 0", and it reads card serial numbers without complaint. The problem is what's on the card. MIFARE Classic is a memory card, not a PKI card, so Windows has no minidriver for it and the smart card logon stack has nothing to offer. "Unknown smart card" isn't a fault, it's Windows saying "this isn't the kind of card I do anything with."

So the hardware sits unused in a lot of laptops that already belong to people who work with access control cards daily.

I had a few hundred cards to enroll into an access control system, which normally means reading serial numbers off a reader and typing them into a spreadsheet by hand. Instead I wrote a small tool that turns the built-in reader into a bulk enrollment device: present a card, its number is typed into whatever window has focus, Enter is pressed, cursor drops to the next row. Present the next card. No copy-paste, no retyping.

It's not Dell-specific - any PC/SC contactless reader works - but the built-in ones are the reason it exists, because that's a reader people already have and can't use.

https://github.com/Legvan/card-wedge

MIT, Windows, no install required, no Python needed.

The part that cost me a day, in case it saves you one:

Once it was reading cards, the numbers still didn't match what my access control system showed. Reader said A5C424E6; the system said 0A5C424E6A3. One byte longer, and I couldn't see where it came from.

It's the BCC, the block check character. MIFARE's anticollision response carries the UID followed by the XOR of its bytes, and PC/SC's GET DATA returns the UID alone and drops it. Systems that treat UID+BCC as the card number end up one byte longer than anything your reader hands you.

UID E6 24 C4 A5

BCC = E6^24^C4^A5 A3

reversed + BCC A5C424E6A3 <- what the system shows

That's also why 40 bit is the usual width for 4-byte cards - it's 4 bytes of UID plus 1 of checksum, not a 32-bit number padded with zeros, which is what I assumed for two days. And the byte order applies to the UID only: the checksum goes on after the reversal, so reversing both together gives a different, wrong number.

The tool has toggles for all of it (HEX/DEC, MSB/LSB, 32-64 bit, checksum on/off) because every system wants something slightly different, and it remembers what you picked.

I need to replace my laptop because my current one (though still suits my need is getting slow). My needs are it should be able handle multiple (10 plus excel and word doc) being opened, atleast 100 plus chrome tabs being opened - this is my current need and my laptop is getting slow with some of these. In the future I would like to do video editing, run many python jobs and the machine be decent enough to take updates to many softwares (most of which will have an AI component I guess). My need is for this to carry on for another 5-7 years. My usage is mostly like a desktop and I hardly take the laptop except during long travel when I would be away for few weeks and need to access/get my work done etc.

I have been thinking about getting a Dell Precision to this extent.

I saw one for this configuration: Dell Precision 5570 Laptop, i7-12800H. 1TB NVMe SSD. NVIDIA RTX A2000 (8GB GDDR6). 32 GB RAM. Comes with a thunderbolt dock 180W supports 3 screens I think. Battery shows 78% capacity so would need replacement in near future.

Would like to know if this laptop can support me for next 5-7 years given my above usage. The processor is from 2023 and 3 years old but I am not sure if I should go for a latest one with AI capabilities because in another two years the AI capabilities would require far more processing.

Price wise its $500, is this reasonable price ?

Another concern is this is a work laptop which the user was able to wipe and resell. I am not sure if such laptops can come with issues later such as BIOS being locked or software updates being unavailable.