This is less a question than a, “Hey, I can fix that!” thread, but I would appreciate some input from those more knowledgeable.
I’ve been using the laptop for three months. I think it was about the night before last that I noticed that the light by the external power cord jack is red (or a bloody orange, really) if it’s charging and white if it’s not.
So last night that should have been a clue. Now that I think about it, I seem to remember that I put the cord in before going to sleep and the light was white, but should have been red. I shrugged…
Well, it didn’t charge. Today there was all this oxidized crud on the cord plug. Teal like from copper on the end, some red steel rust inside, and a lot of dark grey smut on the outside. It looked burnt, I was pretty pessimistic.
So I’d gotten it wet, had a clue something was wrong, and was too stupid/ignorant to inspect why it was acting wrong. I suspect the plug had fallen in the tray under an indoor plant.
I cleaned out the copper oxide with a q-tip, and I think that’s when I bent the internal pin so it wouldn’t even go in. After I straightened that out, I was able to get the computer to recognize it was plugged in, but it wasn’t charging. So then I scraped most of the grey crud off the outer part of the plug, & tried to clean the inside some with a tiny screwdriver.
And it works again. There’s still some visible red rust internally, but I’m relieved I actually have more than 90 minutes of usability before I have to replace a part.
If it works, great.
The worst that will happen is it will fail at some point, and you will be back to where you started.
There’s tiny chance that a poor connection could start a fire, but that possibility exists with any charger.
As long as you got all of the crud off of all the electrical connections you shouldn’t have a problem. Just make sure you don’t place the connector in such a way that it can get wet again.
It’s most important to get the crud scraped off of the parts that actually touch metal to metal. If only a small part of the metal is touching with crud all around it, all of the electricity is forced through the small area of good metal, which can make it heat up and fail.
As long as you got all of the crud scraped off, there’s nothing to worry about at all, in my opinion (as an electrical engineer).
As a tip, by the way: If you can still find one of those old “ink erasers” (you know, the kind that abraded off a thin layer of the paper), those are excellent for cleaning off electrical contacts.
Well, it did it again last night. Dead now. I’m not really sure what’s going on.
Maybe I pulled it out in a hurry and dropped it in the plant’s tray again. But I didn’t think the cord was in there when I picked it up several minutes later.
There’s also a decent chance (especially if this is a Dell), that the small pin in the connector failed (broke, or one of it’s contacts broke, whatever). In many (most?) cases, that pin plays no role in charging the device. Instead, it is used to verify that you’re using an “authentic” charger.
I mention Dell only because they’re somewhat notorious for charging folks to replace their adapters through them instead of buying a third-party product.