It all happens. We break our laptop's charger cable or we don't have the correctcharger in the first place,and we are tempted to buy one of those "replacement adapters" from fleabay.
Well... please don't use those. They havethe same issues that cheap ATX PSUs have.
The guide I will show here involves taking an existing charger and replacing just the cable with the one from a replacement adapter.
This can be useful if:
1. You broke the original cable
2. You have acharger with the correct voltage and the same or higher amperage, but not the right end
3. You have a bin of broken quality chargers and crappy replacement chargers
I ended up making five chargers for my asus laptop.
First, if you are going to use a charger that wasn't originally designed for your laptop [all five of mine are NOT asus brand chargers]
Most laptops are ~19v, and are tolerant on input voltage. An 18.5v laptop should work fine with a 19.5v adapter. Some laptops are weird [like macbooks or my dad's toshiba] and may use 16V instead. Just check to make sure the charger you intend to use is the right voltage.
Make sure the wattage is AT LEAST the same as the one that your laptop was designed for. The higher the wattage, the better. I only use 90w adapters on my asus because it is a power hungry laptop.
Then go ahead and find a cheap replacement adapter. We will only be using it for the plug on the end of the wire.
Step One:
Carefully open up your replacement adapter.
Step Two:
Laugh at the internals.
Step Three:
Snip off the wires to the DC jack.
Step Four:
Dispose of the offending device.
Step Five:
Find an adapter that isnt crap. In this tutorial, I will be using one of those "Universal until you loosethe ends" adapter.
Step Six:
Cut the very end of the plug off, leaving some strain relief. This will be removed, we are just doing this to use as much cable as possible.
Step Seven:
Strip the ends of the wire, so you have a positive [white] and ground [bare wire]
Step Eight:
Here is the cable from the crappy adapter. The wire used in it are not very good, which is why we will be cutting it short.
Step Nine:
Cut the crappy cable right at the noise choke.
Step Ten:
Cut and strip the wires here as well.
Step Eleven:
Use your multimeter to check which cable is ground. The blue one here is ground.
Step Twelve:
Check which cable is positive. In this case, the brown one is positive. We checked both of these because you never know with Chinese crap.
Step Thirteen:
Now that we know our polarity, lets cut a section off of the positive wire and strip it again, andsolder it to the positive one on the charger.
Step Fourteen:
Wrap this connection in electrical tape.
Step Fifteen:
Solder the negative wires together, and cut off any extra wire.
Step Sixteen:
Wrap the rest of it in electrical tape, and measure the voltage at the end of the connector. Bend the cable around to make sure it is solid.
Step Seventeen:
Plug it into your laptop to test it.
I hope you guys find this useful, and please, for the love of whatever it is you believe in, don't use those third party adapters.