And I don’t want to pay $70 + S&H. I’m hoping that those of you with a bit more knowledge about electrical stuff could help me out.
I have a Compaq Presario V2000. I must have pinched the power cord or something because the insulation on the cord is cut through. It still works, and I put some electrical tape around it, but I’m assuming this isn’t really safe. This is what HP sells as a replacement.
The cut is in the cord running from the adapter to the laptop end. The simplest thing to do would be do just replace the cord, but I don’t know how to do that. Are there places that will do this for a reasonable fee? If not, can I buy a “generic” adapter/cord? I went a-googling and found stuff like this for ~$25. Does this seem safe to buy? Do they sell this sort of thing in normal stores where I won’t have to pay $10 S&H?
In case it’s relevant, the fine print on the back of the adapter says:
INPUT: 100-240V~ 1.6A(1.6A) 50-60Hz
OUTPUT: 18.5V(18.5V) === 3.5A(3.5A) LPS (-)–C*–(+) [The “===” thing is a solid top line with 3 dashed lines under]
65W
I have the same laptop that you do, and had 2 others (HP and Compaqs) that take the same adapter. I have had to replace the power supplies a few times, and I did just fine on eBay, where I found HP branded bricks for a fraction of the price from HP.
Funny, I had that same laptop and ended up getting a total of three chargers for it over the life of the laptop. I bought all of them on ebay.
I ended up dumping the laptop eventually. The female power recepticle on the laptop got worn from repeated insertion / wiggling (hold it, I am still talking about a laptop, right?). I took the laptop apart and it was a horrible location to desolder the old plugin and install a new one, so I ditched the laptop. It did like to overheat.
Instead, I bought two Tosiba Satellite A135’s for 2nd house use and carry pc for work/travel/image editing, and also bought a P205 for the main home PC. I have not had a single problem with these three laptops, and as a bonus all adapters are interchangeable.
That is the low voltage end and if it still works. I just use the electrical tape. Do you put the cord in water? If not, then IMO, a couple wraps of electrical tape and you are good for another 100,000. miles…
Seconded. If the wire isn’t broken inside the insulation, it should be fine. If you want it to look reasonably tidy, go down to the hardware store and buy some shrink tubing, which is plastic tubing that slips on over the wire and then shrinks down when you point a hair dryer at it, and generally comes out tidier than a wad of electrical tape. The main danger from that bit of the cord isn’t actually to you, but to the laptop; the whole point of the brick is to convert rich, chunky wall power into something more delicate for the computer to digest, and if for some reason the uninsulated bit of cord were to come into contact with something else containing larger amounts of electricity, the computer would probably object.
If you put a hole in the cord running from the wall to the brick, that’s a different matter. Those are much easier to replace, however; they’re either standard power cables (on older, larger bricks) or a figure-8 connector, like on recent Toshiba laptops and late-model Playstation2s.
The bricks themselves, if they fail, generally fail inside in an invisible manner that produces unhelpful symptoms like “I plug it in and nothing happens”. I would be kind of impressed if you ever managed to break the insulation on the power brick, as many of them are epoxied or melted shut and cannot be opened for repair without the aid of a hacksaw/Dremmel/hand grenade.
