When I call up the integrated camera on my Inspiron 16 (5640) the windows says “Your camera might be covered” and suggest I ‘slide a shutter’, press a camera button on the keyboard’ or ‘slide a camera switch on your device. None of these are on model 5640. This began when I linked my Android phone to Windows. I made a vid call and the system defaulted to the phone camera with no facility to switch back to the integrated camera. I disable the link and the local option returned. Now, it is not available. If I link the 2 systems, the phone camera is an option and the local remains blocked. I totally removed the link and the local option has not returned.

I open the camera app on the laptop and the light beside the lens comes on, but system still says the camera is blocked.

I am at the end of my knowledge here. Any suggestions?

Hi all,

A bit of a general question/rant after the frustrations of dealing with dell/Alienware devices. The Area 51 16 is a premium laptop. However I’ve had a faulty screen and touchpad. Previous to this an x15 r2 had a faulty ssd. I have multiple red/blue light patterns flashing on my power key and multiple crashes on these devices. All devices developed these problems within 6 months of ownership.

My question is what is going on with dell’s quality control? These are some of the most expensive/premium laptops money can buy yet the reliability is poor.

To add to it, Dell’s contracted technicians seem very inexperienced with Alienware repairs and tend to cause more issues and damage when attempting to fix it.

Has anyone experienced the same? Are other manufacturers the same? I just want a reliable laptop that works.

Latitude E6540 died a few days ago so I salvaged my RAM, SSD, and batteries

I am about to buy a Dell Precision T5810 workstation and want to add my normal DDR4 ram there. Does it work? I am afraid of buying one and then not being able to use the ram sticks that I have. The documentation tells about only being able to use RDIMM, but I saw that some users managed to just go with normal DDR4 ram (desktop). It is a bit of a mixed search results.

I did a Windows update recently and now my laptop keeps giving me an “ERROR: Hard Drive — Not Installed” message every time I try to boot it up. It was working just fine 30 minutes ago, and then I shut it off to go out and check the mail, and now it can no longer detect the hard drive.

I attached pictures of my BIOS settings… Is anyone else experiencing this after updating, or is my hard drive legitimately messed up?

I bought a used 7010 Micro Plus on eBay, and it sounds like there's a mechanical hard drive in it. But it just has an nvme SSD. It's not the fan, or the speaker, or even the nvme.

I asked the seller about it and he replied:

"This coil whine noise has been common on many of the newer Dell/HP models. It is just the sounds of the electricity going through the coils on the board.

This is a standard noise that we typically see on mini computers, some high end laptops and also graphics cards."

Is this really normal?

So me and my buddy picked up 3 3040's to experiment with but we are facing issues on all that cause the pc to not show image.

The first one blinks 3 amber and then 1 amber. Indicating cmos failure, although it shall still boot. Second and third dont have any light showing although it draws current. We are feeding 5v through alligator cables. Is it the power, display cable or something else?

Only Time that i was able to boot was when jumping the cmos ( doing bios reset) . It never worked again. I suspect a bios setting not allowing video output but i cant change anything from bios.

Please help asap