Last August I bought a Dell laptop. I was going back to school, so I needed my own computer, as both my wife and I do a lot of computer work (and I needed something I could carry around).
This isn’t about the laptop.
This is about the adaptor. My first adaptor died within a month of buying my laptop, but that wasn’t Dell’s fault. My cat chewed it up. Fine. I bought a new one over the phone. $80 for the damn thing, but at least my computer worked.
My second adaptor lasted 7 months. March or so, it burned out; simply didn’t work any more. So I bought a new one online. They’re getting cheaper at least: $70.
My third adaptor lasted a month. At this point I am no longer interested in hemorrhaging money to Dell, but I have no time during business hours to call, and homework to do, so I bit the bullet and bought yet another: $66.
It arrived yesterday. It burned out today.
Fuck you Dell. It’s fucking finals time and I have projects due that I can only do on the laptop (for instance, I don’t have Power Point on my desktop). Would it be that fucking hard to make a power adaptor that can withstand the strain of, you know, being plugged into the wall?
I’m not sitting in front of your computer, obviously, but I’m perplexed. I’ve worked with laptops in office environments for ten years, seeing probably thousands of systems in the meantime, and I’ve never once seen a bad power adapter. I’m not saying it can’t happen, but I find it really suspicious that you’re blowing them so quickly. Have you spoken to dell about the issue? There could be something wrong with your computer. I can’t say for sure, but like I said - I’ve never heard of someone needing one new adapter, much less four. Something else has to be going on.
Sounds like it’s a probably a problem with your laptop, not the adapters.
I don’t understand electronics well enough to say how your laptop might affect the performance of the adapters, but there’s no way they’re shipping that many defective adapters.
No, it’s just that Steve Jobs and the cats have an understanding, they don’t chew on Mac power cords and he delivers them premium caviar at the stroke of midnight once a week.
Which is actually kind of funny, since the first laptop power adapter I ever had flake out on me was for a clamshell iBook. Crappy artsy-fartsy Euro-retro design called for a thin transparent plastic sheath on the wires, which chipped and peeled away until only bare wire was showing.
Fuck Apple. There’s trying to make the hardware look nice, and then there’s overzealously creating a hazardous crappy-looking piece of electronic kistch with a logo.
On edit, I might also point out that I’ve had an unusually high number of Dell power adapters crap out on me too. Usually the week after the warranty expires. Acer and Compaq power adapters, not so much.
I see that we’ve already figured out the problem. Good deal.
I used to work for Dell and I’ve never heard of a power adaptors blowing after just seven months. That doesn’t mean it can’t happen, but the only adaptors I sold were for models that were two, three, up to six years old.
I guess any piece of equipment can have trouble … ha ha! Kitty trouble that is!!
My own personal laptop is a Dell I bought back in 2001. I have the same power adaptor it came with … you know, one of those adaptors that has since been recalled for burning up. I was too lazy to actually send it in, even though I should have. Instead, I just keep an eye on the thing when I’m using it and unplug it when I’m not. I mean, it worked fine for years before the recall, and it continues to work fine.
Your cat can’t taste voltage, and doesn’t understand the intricacies of AC power. Your cat CAN taste bitter chemicals specifically designed to taste nasty to cats, and does understand that chewing on a cord painted with the stuff is not fun.
Aaah, power adapters! As opposed to VGA-DVI adapters and min-VGA to VGA adapters and USB-PS2 adapters and minijack-dual RCA adapters and FireWire-SCSI adapters and FW800-FW400 adapters and USB-ADB adapters and USB-MIDI adapters and USB-digitalCamera miniUSB adapters and all the others.
Does unqualified “adapter” really mean “power cord” to most other laptop users?
Umm, I would be the usual Nerdy Guy in Crowd. Never owned a non-Mac computer and System 3 was in its heyday when I first hopped on board and began mousing around. Would rather use a dusty old Quadra running System 8.1 than a fast modern Dell running Vista. Etc. The new MacBooks that do the magnetic attachment and easy-breakaway / no-damage-done-when-you-trip-over-them thing are pretty cool. But they’ve had some serious lemons when it comes to power adapters and I’ve been on the bleedy lemony edge in the form of a WallStreet PowerBook. It was a truly great computer (one of those era-straddling models, it booted MacOS 8.1 when shipped and did all the old-world stuff like ADB and DIN-8 serial ports and SCSI, but when souped up with a faster processor daughtercard and crammed with RAM it runs MacOS X 10.3 and even 10.4 pretty nicely nearly 9 years later), but it had two major design flaws, one of which was that the stupid AC-in port was a part of the sound card which in turn was soldered to the motherboard and the solder joint ITSELF was the only structural element supporting the weight and resisting the torque applied by the cord.
I must’ve broken the damn thing six times over the years. And it’s a nasty piece of work to swap it out, it’s in one of those “Step One: remove everything that is not the sound card from the PowerBook; Step Two: lift sound card out” places, chock-full of opportunities to do damage to other things while you’re trying to get to it. ugh.
