Dell Inspiron Laptop frying AC adapters

Strider590

joe7dust wrote: »

It seemed to get better after wiggling the connection between the brick and the cable that leads to the electrical outlet.

That's truly awful! really bad design!
It's not the same lead is it? was the mains lead replaced along with the PSU? lose connection on the mains side causes arching, causes burnt contacts, causes high resistance and poor conductivity.

Keep us all informed what happen's, it'll make a useful reference for anyone else out there.

joe7dust

"It's not the same lead is it? was the mains lead replaced along with the PSU?"

I don't understand what you're asking but yes I believe it is arcing. I can't see it but I hear it when I wiggle it.

joe7dust

Once it charged to 80% I decided to do some more testing.

I wiggled and unplugged the cable and it seems like the intermittent connection is less of a problem now.

This could be one of two things, either due to temperature (it's fairly hot now) or battery charge level.

I'm kinda leaning towards battery charge level. I guess somehow this wiggling (which I could hear creating arcs) kind of jumpstarted the charge into the nearly empty battery, but once it was at a decent level it didn't have as hard of a time.

Also I found a blog about power supply issues with a Inspiron 8600 where Dell was claiming 65W was enough but using a 90W fixed the issue for 100s of people. They went so far as to ship new units to customers that were no longer covered by warranty.

If we hit a brick wall here I will just recommend he buys a 90W power supply, use a surge protector, unplug it from the wall when not in use, don't let the battery drop below 10%, and unplug it from the wall when it hits 100%.

*edit* I noticed while it was on it never hit 100% just hit 99% and floated there. It did this by drawing 1A for awhile, then jumping to 2A and slowly trickling down at about 0.01A per second until after a minute or so it skipped down to 1A again for a bit then repeated the cycle. Once I turned off the laptop it seemed to hit 100% because it trickled down from 1A at the same rate then jumped to 0.01A and fluctuated 0.01A-0.02A until I decided to unplug it from the wall.

joe7dust

Anyone have any fresh ideas on this?

joe7dust

[RESOLVED!]

Looks like my 90W recommendation was a good idea. Dell made the same mistake twice first on the 8600 now the 1525! lol and they even replaced it 3 times with the wrong one

joe7dust

http://search.dell.com/results.aspx?s=gen&c=us&l=en&cs=&k=insperion+1525+power+adapter&cat=all&x=0&y=0