My new to me baby has arrived, a-re-use Dell 5490 latitude 14 " screen

Brickwizard

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What a bargain, the sellers had a glut of these machines with the I5-8525u CPU and 16gb Ram cost less than £100 usual price for a grade A re-furb one usually ranges from £180 -£220,,
It took me what seemed like hours [but was probably 30 minutes], to find the Quick start and secure boot, and switch them off, along with a few other BIOS adjustments [to suit my use of the machine], then I put the ISO USB drive in the left side port, switched on jiggled F10 and nothing it booted straight into W11, swapped to the rear USB port and tried again, and success Mint LMDE booted to test mode,, then installed without further issue, still have a few hours work to do swapping what files I can from the dead machine [I can still run the old drives from it using a sata-usb2 cable but it's a bit slow, and I have 4 drives full of stuff to sort and save, but hey I'm in no rush. [oops need to clean lens on camera before I next use it]
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Awesome! Enjoy your new laptop!
 
many 'kids' do you have now in total?
well its older brother together with 2 Acer 32 bit machines and a very old basic Android tab are being evicted by instructions from She who must be obeyed, so I will be down to just 2 this new to me lappy and my HP prodesk sff [I5-5th gen]
 
well its older brother together with 2 Acer 32 bit machines and a very old basic Android tab are being evicted by instructions from She who must be obeyed, so I will be down to just 2 this new to me lappy and my HP prodesk sff [I5-5th gen]
Not bad, I have 2 laptops in addition to this PC, both are 64 bit and 4GB RAM and 1 HDD, used only for backup and if something critically goes wrong with this PC.
Didn't turn them on for last 5 months or so.
 
Another bit of the puzzle sorted, the Battery was only holding around 17% charge, so I spent a while searching the net for a replacement, New Branded Dell over £90 deliverd, unbranded same spec, £29-95.. no contest, asked daughter to order from Amazon for me, last night, expecting delivery some time the end of the week, and lo-and-behold, it arrived about 10 am this morning, only need to prove it over the next 2/3 charges.
 
Isn't that an infra-red or ambiant detector located right next to the camera?
 
Isn't that an infra-red or ambiant detector located right next to the camera?
That's probably an ambient light detector. Dell were fitting these on the Lats back in the 2000s, 'cos even my 2008 D630 has one...

It works even under Linux, because the detector appears to be independently hard-wired into the display backlight subsystem.......without any reliance on the operating system at all.

My 2002 Inspiron used to be like this with the manual backlight intensity adjusters. Worked with Linux just the same, because the keyboard buttons were wired directly into the display backlight...

They're a useful bit of kit. The older system was manually-controlled.....the newer one is automatic. By & large, they both do the same job; the newer one just does it FOR you.


Mike. :D
 
Either side of the camera are what appear to be pin prick microphone holes, the blue thing in the middle of the keyboard is the auto light sensor for the backlight keyboard
 
That's probably an ambient light detector.

Thank you both, i too have such feature but was somehow still hoping perhaps it could be rendered useful as an IR receiver for iP-TV applications... Most likely the video camera has an IR filter on it, so no luck there. I suppose old IrDA peripherals completely disapeared.
 
My Inspiron doesn't even -have- a camera. No microphone. No ambient light sensor. :(

It also doesn't have a working battery or a second GB of RAM, but hey, it boots up Linux. :)
 
Congratulations on your new laptop, I hope that your Linux journey is relatively smooth however, If my own experience tells me it won't be all brown sugar and pumpkin pie.
 
Congratulations, dear Brickwizard,
Great find: looking very good
Enjoy :)
 

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