Today's Audience Participation Moment

[c9]

If I use a 15V 2.0A AC Adapter for my laptop, which officially requires a 15V 3.0A Adapter, and it works fine for a couple years, what sort of damage may I have wrought?

(My laptop battery doesn't play properly anymore, so I suspect that I killed it. Silly me, not paying attention to these things. I totally do NOT get electricity.)

Comments

[simplisticton.livejournal.com]

I may have this totally wrong, but if so, so did the person I asked (who's an electrical engineer, but the chance is higher that I misunderstood his explanation, which went on for about the length of a coffee-break)...

When you're recharging a battery, the resistance varies with the current. When you start charging a nearly empty battery, the resistance is low and the current is high (i.e, the battery takes everything it can get). As the charge increases, the resistance increases and thus the amperage drops (so called "trickle-charging"). In your case, the power-supply was under-amped for the job of charging the battery, so the battery took longer to receive a full charge, thus causing the resistance to be higher for longer. High levels of resistance = high levels of heat = bad for battery.

So yeah, you probably did some damage to your battery, but, like Pete says, you typically don't get more than a couple of years out of a laptop battery anyway because they're damn easy to abuse.

[simplisticton.livejournal.com]

Err, Sarah, not Pete. Whoops.

[cap-hill-latte.livejournal.com]

This person wasn't Veech was it? Or Dr. "I called NB Power to ask them to turn the power down" Wasson?