A Little Cheezed

My laptop has been limping. I asked Santa for one for Xmas, but that's a pretty big order. It's the slowest machine in the house, but I use it the most. It's pretty reliable, but there's been one major problem that I thought would torpedo me. I've been having trouble with the power cord.

The cord is structured like this. It goes from the wall to a box, from the box to the laptop, about one inch away from the laptop there is a barrel and after that it plugs into the machine. Right at the little barrel, from bending so much, the wire is frayed and it hasn't been making contact very well. I've had to bend it and get it just so so the machine would power up and get it's battery charged.

Tonight it finally gave up the ghost. I figured I'd take 5 minutes and take the barrel off to see what kind of electronic gizmo was inside. Maybe I could get a replacement from "Le Shaque Du Radio". At worst, it would mean a new power converter from Dell. So I get my tools and plug and pry and dig.

Here's what I found.

1. A rubberized outer "barrel".
2. A hard plastic inner "barrel".
3. A small wrap of electrical tape.
4. The wire.

The only thing I could think of was that they put this thing on so the wire frays prematurely and you have to buy a power connector. I fixed it with about .1 cent of electrical tape. A new power supply, if I could get one, would probably run 30 or 40 bucks. If I couldn't find one, It would mean a new machine.

I understand things breaking, but I hate it when they design stuff to break on purpose. If you know someone that has that problem with a laptop, send 'em to this story.

BTW. 80,000 plus dead from the tsunami. They think it's gonna run over 100,000. Amazing.

Cya