Dell Wyse 3040 Amber light issue

Hardware & Gaming PC Builds, Modding & Overclocking
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I bought a Dell Wyse 3040 from a refurb seller. As my display does not have DisplayPort nor do i have the cable so have not been able to see what POSTs when powered ON so please suggest me a good “active converter/adapter” for DP to HDMI conversion.

Secondly, when I first powered it, it blinked Amber light thrice, then a brief pause and then once more. This repeated ad infinium. Google search called it a bad CMOS battery issue so bought a new one with the connector and all and replaced old one with that. Now this rhythmic blinking happens thrice and then the Amber LED stays solid till powered off. The adapter is OEM Dell adapter and the unit has WiFi module but the wires are not pressing against the CMOS clear button and I have cleared the CMOS too, removing the battery and 20 second depress on the button. What could be the issue here, if anyone faced something similar in the past?

Dell Wyse 3040 Refurbished
2

Dells are sometimes finicky with the power adapters you use.

I had the same amber light issue with a couple of 5070s, I needed to get the original Dell power adapters to resolve that.

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3

It came with the original power adapter, Dell one with LED on the male jack. Any idea about active adapter for display port to HDMI?

4

I’ve been using this with my Dells and Lenovos

It was 400 at the time

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5

Bought a UGreen one, Amazon.in

Still nothing got displayed on the screen and Amber light issue persists and this No display being put out seems to be the new issue.

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6

Did you go through the information here especially the Display and Battery sections -

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7

I got the CMOS battery from local computer wallah and when that didn’t work, I bought a new one from Evelta. Still the 3-1 error code. As for DP to HDMI conversion, tried simple adapter and now the expensive one too but none works.

No signal is being detected by the display so cannot really know if it is the battery at fault or what.

8

Shot in the dark but try a displayport to vga adapter. I vaguely remember that hdmi didn’t work for some units but vga did.

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Will see but still going to need an HDMI output from the device as I’m using a TV as display and it has only HDMI inputs.

10

can’t you ask someone and check it directly with the DisplayPort?

i had to wait for a few days for the DisplayPort cable to arrive just to be able to check the units i bought from here. one of those arrived with a dead battery and another without the network adapter.

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11

@ibose’s link mentioned you can enable fastboot in bios which bypasses a lot of diagnostics checks including the one for display port. So you can get in the bios with the vga adapter, change the settings, and then use it as you want with the hdmi adapter.

I remember with a lot of my dells, only the vga adapter would work, I never investigated why because I’d run them headless. I assume at some point I turned on fastboot to make sure downtime was low.

Really strange that Dell would use display as a reason to prevent POST. Power is understandable, but display?!

Also, I’ve been eyeing these 3040s for years, I really love the potential of the atom processor but I never actually owned this exact model. Maybe if I come up on the 4GB ram versions.

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Hmm. As of now I have no actual need that this box would fulfill, bought it for 2 reasons mainly;

  1. Tinker around with it a bit to see what all it can do that a Raspberry Pi does.
  2. The seller has a good stock of these and seeing their demand on the forum, thought to buy couple of units from him and sell them here. But to do that I need to be sure that I am not being peddled lemons and have to have a test setup that can detect any dud in the lot that I might buy.
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13

Went to local computer shop today, borrowed his DP to VGA adapter and his display. POST became visible. BUT that was not the real issue. I made all the necessary changes in BIOS, came home and tried to boot it, again the 3-1 Amber! Now I remembered seeing it in one YouTube video that the guy’s 3040 would only boot if kept upside down and even in the shop, it was being kept with bottom plate open upside down. So I flipped it and voila! it started working. Then after few hours, got a DP to HDMI cable and tried to boot it, normally, Amber lights. Flipped it and it started working. Have to figure out now that if it is a quirk of 3040 that one has to live with or some solutions is possible for it. Secondly, whatever changes I’m making in BIOS, I think they are not being stored. I suspect so because whenever I’m booting the device, I’m setting up BIOS and then it reboots normally. BUT if it wasn’t storing the BIOS config, settings ought to have been lost between the boots. So am yet to figure out what’s the reason behind it.

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14

Might be time for a repaste of the thermal compound. This processor was released alongside Windows 10, so it’s almost a decade old.

I think the die is exposed like on a GPU so be careful when handling the heatsink.

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Well the “Flipperachi” is working for now so not going for repaste just yet. Installed Thin OS(OS_Merlin_2402_9.5.1079_3040) on it and tried to RDP into an Alpine Linux VM on Proxmox, kept getting AVD package missing error even though NLA was turned Off and no Broker was selected.

While I try to get it up and running, Wyse people of the forum, please tell me what do you use your device for and how?

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16

Dietpi should work well. I am using it natively though.

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It’s going to be super hilarious if it’s because of a malfunctioning chassis intrusion sensor.

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18

You are running it headless or with some DE and if so then which one?

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Yup, it might be so because been using while keeping its bottom plate open so the aforementioned moniker is the kindest thing I could think of for this situation else it’s been like a 2$ Tijuana wh0re, works only on its back and bottom laid bare.

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Headless…….

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