Shady Dell laptop practices

Good question. I'm not real sure. It's probably an IBM. Its not in the original case, the replacement power supply did not fit so I changed cases.

I do have a T43 Lenovo laptop, which I use all the time. I have XP on that one. Aside from putting in a bigger hard drive and replacing the battery, it's original. My only complaint is the sound has always been weak, but a small amp and external speakers solved that.

My work computer is a Dell Precision 5520 (quad-core Xeon, 32GB). It's pig compare to my own Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Yoga (dual-core I7-6600U), despite the Dell being over $1000 more than the Lenovo. The Thunderbolt connection on the Dell doesn't work (won't connect to their dock), either, so the Dock that's supposed to be used with it, is useless. The Dell has been nothing but trouble, while the Thinkpad has been nearly flawless. The OLED touchscreen display on the Thinkpad is awesome, too.

It isn't just Dell. My MacBook knows the serial number on its charger, as well as the battery. Hopefully, there's no software misbehavior on those readings (they'd be interesting in case of a safety recall, though: Apple has done a few of those when a problem emerged).

If there was a buffer-overflow exploit possible on charger serial number readout, how would anyone find out? What if there were a back door that required a sequence of such numbers? It's rather a spooky possibility, and not a pretty one.

Why not simply solder the ID chip inside the laptop at the proper pin and then use what ever comes to mind for a supply ?

Two reasons:

1. It kept the option open of using a genuine Dell charger if one became available;

1. I had not at the time ever opened that laptop and saw no reason to open a potential can of worms.

piglet

Not a very practical one, though. If you have physical access to the computer, you can plug in a USB drive and perform tons of already well known attacks.

Maybe as a tracker and logger system, but who knows what kind of data is accessible over the battery bus. (If it's on the SMBus, potentially quite a lot!)

Tim

You could sell aftermarket bricks with the hypothetical readout exploit pre-installed, and then once the laptop was owned use its own network connection to phone home with the goods

Might as well toss in Wifi, Bluetooth and cellular modules, mostly to listen but occasionally poke at things perhaps.

Such things are also quite available today, a little Wifi AP to throw behind a bush, or plug in to an out-of-the-way outlet.

Lots of fun/hijinx in the IPSec crowd these days. :^)

Tim

I have lots of Optiplex machines all over. I buy them used on eBay for about $70 - 90 each, and have had great luck with them. I have a slightly more expensive one for my main desktop. There are tons of them on eBay all the time. I finally did have one get the capacitor plague.

Jon

When I need to replenish my bank account in order to support my decadent and lavish lifestyle, I fix computahs for money. In a few weeks, I celebrate my 35th year in the business.

My favorite brand and most common computer is Dell. The reasons are:

1. The price point is high enough on fairly new hardware that I can make a profit.
2. Parts are readily available from the scrap dealers on eBay at a tolerable price.
3. They are common enough that any problem I run into has been previously experienced by hundreds of users and is likely to be well documented on the internet.
4. Experience has demonstrated that most models are quite reliable. Sure, there are some design errors, inferior parts, mechanical abominations, and compatibility issues. However, they are few and normally not a problem. The worst was the bulging capacitor problem, which Dell knew about, but continued to ship known defective product: Replacing the capacitors was easy enough and added to my revenue stream:
5. The machines look nice and are generally built well. For desktops, that means more metal than plastic.
6. My customers pay me first to deliver a reliable computer, with features and performance further down the priority list. Dell is not perfectly reliable, but does better than the competition (mostly HP and Lenovo).
7. Dell supplies updates to the BIOS and drivers for somewhat longer than other vendors.
8. Some other reasons that I don't want to discuss here.

My home computah is a Dell Optiplex 960. The office computah is a Dell Optiplex 755 (both of which now run hacked Xeon processors). I also have several later Optiplex machines (790, 7020, 390, etc) in stock which will eventually replace the 960 and 755. There are also several generations of Dell laptops on the shelf. Needless to say, I like Dell and am well experienced with their computer products.

I don't know what to say about the charger problem. I've been waiting for laptop and charger model numbers so I can do some research. Lacking those, I can offer nothing. Well, maybe something. I haven't seen any problems with clones of Dell laptop chargers. I buy them regularly to replace lost chargers at amazingly low prices. Most of what I see are damage caused by "universal" chargers. I should know because I managed to blow up my Dell XPS M1210 laptop by reversing the "tip" on the adapter, thus applying reverse voltage.

I have never heard of a Lenovo getting the capacitor plague. Maybe they use better caps....

Jeff, I share your point of view 100%.

I have bought 4 Dell laptops new and never regretted it.

The last one was a XPS13 last summer. Its first job was to survive a month long motorcycle trip, most of it on the gravel that they call streets in Iceland. Absolutely no problem in that machined alu case.

The Dell power supplies tell the laptop what they can deliver. I once used a customer's Inspiron power supply (80W) on my "Dell Precision Portable Workstation" that normally has a 240W supply. The precision accepted it, but cut down on CPU and charging speed.

That is the way it has to be, not frying underrated Chinese wall warts and being fried then in return.

Gerhard

There are thousands of miles of high-tension lines most of them running through the middle of nowhere; what's to stop someone from scattering a bunch of little $5 computers with WiFi around that capacitive couple to the near field for power and route the data to run whatever scammy hustle thru the open WiFi AP at the nearest gas station?

No need to reinvent the wheel. All you need to do is install Dell System Detect: As far as I can tell, it reports to Dell what's currently inside your machine. Quite handy for troubleshooting if you ignore the privacy implications.

There is Meltdown and Spectre. AMD supposedly is not subject to Meltdown but may be affected by Spectre.

bitrex wrote on 1/8/2018 10:03 AM:

I have a Lenovo laptop which has a special 3 contact connector roughly the size and shape of a USB connector. It reports the capacity of the power brick via a resistor. When I bought the laptop a 135 watt replacement power brick was more than a yard. So I bought a cheap eBay model that was rated for 95 watts which was more than enough to power the unit if you weren't charging the battery. But the laptop doesn't see the right resistor value and pops up an alert every couple of minutes. So I could use the cheap brick to charge up the battery with the laptop off, but it wasn't really practical to run the computer from it.

So I just didn't worry with it and now 135 watt power bricks are much cheaper. Probably doesn't matter. This thing is such a POS that if the power brick goes bad, I'd likely just get a new machine. The only thing stopping me from tossing this hunk of crap anyway is that now they not only mucked up the mouse pad, the new laptops seem to all have the arrow keys scrunched two keys into the size of one!

Why do they like making my life difficult? My old Toshiba was great in regards to the touch pad and the keyboard. I can't believe other users don't seem to care about these usability issues.

That's a shame, I've never owned a Lenovo laptop but the Lenovo/Motorola Mobility "Moto" series of cell phones are some of the best "budget" Android smartphones available in the $150-250 price range

IME, there's no longer any reason to buy aftermarket power bricks. I can find Lenovo's (or Dell's, for that matter) for a reasonable price.

Everyone seems to have mucked around with keyboards at one point or another. "The nice thing about standards...". I *hate* touchpads. The cursor is always going off into hyperspace while I'm typing and dragging just doesn't work. I much prefer the Lenovo TrackStick. I have the touchpad turned off on my ThinkPads. Not possible with the POS Dell at work.

They have worms in Dell notebooks??? Is that to compost the unused bits?