WD-19 Power Button

Thank you. That's very helpful

I just wanted to add - I went ahead and bought the Latitude 5590 with the WD-19 - and I'm very pleased to say that the power button does indeed turn om the laptop, even if it is completely off and not just asleep. So - just like you said. Without your help I might have believed what I was told by Dell Chat and not gone ahead with the purchase - so I rekcon Dell owe you one

@Chris-W  thanks for the follow-up and the kind words!  Glad it's performing as advertised and as you'd hoped it would.  As for the bad answer from Dell Support, they're expected to field a broad range of questions about a broad range of products, so even though in this particular case the answer was available in the manual, as a general statement, that breadth means that when a question about a specific product is asked and the answer relies on understanding some underlying technical concepts, they might not always have enough depth of knowledge about that concept or how it's implemented in that specific product to answer correctly.  By comparison, people like me on this forum get to pick and choose the threads that we want to jump into based on the ones that align with our expertise and interests.

@SeanObba  Looking over the WD19 manual available on support.dell.com, a triple blink is the only listed docking LED indicator behavior, and that means that the dock has started drawing power from the power adapter. So it sounds like it’s working as it should.

Hi, I just got a WD19 (180W) docking station for my Latitude 7490 laptop.  Everything works as it should but the only question remains to be answer is; is the power button on docking station suppose to light up when the laptop is on?  The light on the power button briefly blinks when I plug in the power cable to the docking station but that's only time I see the power button light comes on.  Is my docking station defective?

thank you for that.  i saw that too but that just didn't make common sense since that power button is supposed to function identically as the power button on the laptop, i (& the common sense) would expect the same from the LED on that power button.  I was wondering if other users with WD 19 see the same.

Mine does that too.

They say the power button on the WD-19 Dock is "supposed to act" like the power button on the laptop.

Wake/Sleep/On/Off all work with mine but the LED indicator light does not light up. Laptop power button is always on when the laptop is on, so I presume the power button on the dock should do the same but no...

This is pretty frustrating at times because when I connect my laptop to the dock with the lid closed, since the power button indicator light is 'off' I don't even know if the laptop is actually on or not. 

Dock is currently connected to my XPS 13 which has all the recommended driver and BIOS updates.

Is there any solution to this? or is the dock actually defective?

I am in the same boat with the WD19TB and the XPS 13. The power button LED remains off while the dock is operational. I've ordered a replacement dock, but given your experience, I'm a bit skeptical the LED will work. I would love to hear from anyone who finds a solution.

Can someone explain to me why people here are so worried about the behavior of an LED on a dock button if the dock is working fine -- including the ability to use the Power button to control the system -- and there's nothing in the WD19 manual to suggest that the Power button is SUPPOSED to remain on?  Do people really need to see a lit up Power button on a dock to be reassured that their dock and/or system is actually running?  If you're able to see the dock, you're also obviously able to see your system and the peripherals attached to said dock, in which case the behavior of those devices would seem to make it plainly obvious whether they're running.

If you dock a system while it's running, then your dock-attached displays will light up.  So if the displays DON'T light up, then the system is off or asleep.  And if the displays don't light up is because the dock itself isn't powered even if the system is on, then you'd be able to discern that by the ABSENCE of the triple blink that occurs when you dock a system -- which is likely why that behavior is programmed.

The power button LED remaining off is more of an annoyance. I use the dock with two displays and my laptop closed, and with my prior dock -- the TB16 -- I could look at the power button and immediately discern whether the laptop was on or off. Due to this problem -- again, merely an annoyance -- I have to hit a key or move the mouse to see if the displays light up indicating power is on. In speaking with Dell, my XPS 13 9350 is too old to justify releasing a BIOS update to activate the power button LED on the newer WD19TB. I have a Latitude 7400 on the way, and hopefully that will include the necessary BIOS bits to activate the LED.

@jphughan I have Dell G7 7790 and Dock WD19tb.. power button is pretty useless, can't power on/sleep/wake etc though it blinks as you said.. port and display all work fine. Also I didn't see any dock options in BIOS. Does that mean my computer cant support power button feature ?? 

@manojrai8  Very likely yes.  I haven't seen anybody report success using the Power button on any Dell docks with Inspiron or Alienware systems yet.  That requires firmware-level support within the system, which Dell for the moment only seems to be implementing on Latitude, Precision, XPS, and I think Vostro systems.  Those are their business-oriented product lines, and I guess they've decided to keep "full" docking station support limited to those product lines.  Other "bonus" features of the WD19 docks like MAC Address Passthrough and PXE Boot are likely unavailable too, although those are admittedly much less likely to be of interest to non-business users.

I certainly hope that Dell removes this artificial feature differentiation between their product lines at least when it comes to Power button support, particularly since the implementation effort for that would likely be trivial, but I'm not in charge.  And this might change at least for Thunderbolt systems in the future, because Intel's upcoming Thunderbolt 4 standard will require that the system support being woken from sleep when connected to a Thunderbolt dock.  Granted, that isn't the same as full support for an external Power button since "wake from sleep" doesn't imply "power up from shutdown" or "perform hard shutdown", but wake from sleep being mandatory might be enough of a nudge for Dell to implement full Power button support, and hopefully do so even on regular USB-C systems rather than just TB4 systems.

But obviously that's all hypothetical and in the future, which doesn't help you now.  I'm afraid I don't have better news on that front.  Like I said, I haven't seen anyone report the Power button working on any Inspiron or Alienware system, but I've seen a lot of people with a lot of models in those lines report the opposite.

@jphughan Thanks for your response.. That was quite impressive insight though its unfortunate and almost unreasonable to have these features to be conditional in this time and age. Hopefully Dell comes up with firmware updates that can enable these features atleaset in all Dell systems. Looks like even the ethernet port on this dock is usless as well. What a bummer... 

@manojrai8  Happy to share what I can.  Sorry I don't have better news overall, but the Ethernet port should absolutely be usable on any system.  The Ethernet port in the WD19 is essentially just a USB Gigabit Ethernet adapter built into a dock enclosure, in fact the device literally comes up as "Realtek USB Gigabit Ethernet".  Dell provides a driver for it on their support page for the WD19, although newer Windows releases should have an appropriate driver built in.  The only features of the Ethernet port you wouldn't be able to use without using an officially supported model are PXE boot and MAC Address Passthrough, but those features aren't relevant to everybody.