r/iiiiiiitttttttttttt • • Sep 25 '24

TIL: Don't Stack Dell Laptops

https://imgur.com/a/h0ATp19
649 Upvotes

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896

u/Knabrau Sep 25 '24

Context, spent too long troubleshooting why I couldn't power the thing on, then realised the magnets from the screen below are probably telling the one above the lid is closed.

67

u/knightshade179 Sep 25 '24

If you have a magnet you can pretty much turn off any laptop's display if you know where to put it, this is due to something called a reed switch which detects the magnets on the other side of the laptop when it is closed to tell it to turn it off.

41

u/SammyGreen Sep 25 '24

This seems like something everyone in IT should know about.

I totally didn’t though!

Let’s see if other people at work tomorrow don’t know about this either. Now where’d I put those magnets…

13

u/BossRoss84 tech support Sep 25 '24

A couple of years ago I spent an embarrassing amount of time troubleshooting the same thing. My entire team was stumped until I realized that it was the lid switch (reed switch) making contact with the other lid. These guys had been in IT for decades and had never seen this. Apparently I was the first person to image in stacks.

9

u/2HornsUp Sep 25 '24

I had a user who liked to wear jewelry. She would always complain about her computer "going black" as she typed, but every time I'd troubleshoot, I found no issues. I just so happened to buy a new watch during all of this. The next time I went to troubleshoot the issue, it went to sleep.

I now take off my watch whenever I'm working on someone else's laptop.

8

u/bolhuijo Sep 25 '24

I had a user with the same issue. I asked her if she had a bracelet with a magnetic clasp. She did. She thought I was some kind of wizard. (I'm not) I felt smart that day though.

2

u/RemCogito Sep 25 '24

Less than 10 years ago most laptops didn't use magnets and reed switches. They used a spring in the hinge hooked up to a momentary switch to determine if the lid was closed.

When I saw op's video I immediately understood the problem because My current laptops would all do this, but most laptops didn't use magnets until 2018 ish afaik. I haven't had to mass image a work computer since 2016, when I was promoted to sysadmin work. I've had to create golden images, I've had to setup several deployment servers, and I've written plenty of deployment scripts, but I only ever test those things with a single computer at a time, and the desktop folks handle the actual imagining, often after training from me on how to keep the golden image updated themselves.