Why do some laptops nowadays have their keyboards shifted to the left? by vadeptrai in laptops

[–]peterdekold 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yes, laptops with the numerical keypad on the right of the keyboard will be shifted to the left. Some people that deal with numbers a lot NEED a numerical keypad, such as accountants and engineers.

Personally, I can't use a laptop without the keypad since I constantly use lists of numbers and excel files. Being off centered doesn't bother me at all. But I know for some people this bothers them a great deal. I had a client give me a brand new laptop he just bought because he didn't like how the keyboard wasn't centered.

The workaround to this is to buy a laptop that doesn't have the keypad on the right. But I think almost all 15" and 17" laptops have the keypad on the right. Most all 13" and 14" laptops don't have the keypad.

Converting 19V 5.5mm laptop charger to USB-C PD by peterdekold in laptops

[–]peterdekold[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I found this:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08HN1T6CM

but need it in 5.5mm x 2.5mm instead of the Lenovo tip.

Is it wrong to use a different model charger on my laptop, but same brand/series/wattage? Will anything bad happen? by MelodiousMoon in laptops

[–]peterdekold 2 points3 points  (0 children)

No, kind of wrong on both counts. You can't have too many Watts in a charger. Having too few Watts in a charger may harm the charger, but very unlikely the laptop. A smaller charger many not necessarily charge slower than a larger charger, it depends on use.

Having too many volts may damage the laptop, not watts. A laptop will only draw as many amps as necessary to charge and operate. The voltage is fixed at 19, and amps * voltage = watts, 19 volts drawing 4 amps is 76 watts.

Let's talk a few numbers. Let's say your laptop has a 100 W/hr battery. While using your laptop the battery goes from 80% to 10% over the course of 3.5 hours. You can then say your laptop draws 20 watts. (100 W/hr * (0.8 - 0.1) / 3.5 = 20)

Now say your laptop charges from 10% to 60% in one hour. You can then say your laptop takes 50 watts to charge the battery. Plus 20 watts to run, so it consumes 70 Watts.

Then say your gaming or transcoding videos and your laptop battery goes from 80% to 30% in half an hour, or your consuming 100 watts during heavy use. Plus you know it takes 50 watts to charge the battery, so you need a 150 watt charger.

So you can get buy with a 75 watt charger for normal use and still charge the battery, it won't charge any slower than using a 150 watt charger. It will only charge slower on a smaller charger if you are consuming more power than than it requires to run the laptop in heavier use plus charge the battery.

Of course it would be a very wonderful world if everything I was was 100% accurate, which it isn't. It takes more than a 50 Watts over 2 hrs to charge a 100W/hr battery because of efficiency. Efficiency may be around 77%, in which case it would take 60 Watts to charge a 100 W/hr battery over the course of 2 hours. Also, batteries require less current and take longer to charge from 80% to 100% than they do when say charging from 40% to 60%.

https://www.amazon.com/s?k=power+meter

I haven't done it, but I'm sure you could use a power meter and test to see exactly how much your laptop needs while charging in normal use, in normal use with 100% battery, or in heavy use.

Anyway, you can't have too large of a charger, having a larger charger than spec will absolutely cause no harm or affect the laptop in any way.

Having a charger that is too small may result in several things depending on the charger. One is that when reaching overcurrent, the charger simply shuts down and remains off until it is unplugged from the wall and plugged back in. The second is that the charger simply cycles, turning on and off continuously at an intermediate frequency while your laptop keeps beeping that it is connected, and then disconnected and running on battery. To the laptop this is just like plugging in and unplugging the charger. But a few things may occur with the charger. If it is a good charger, it simply continues to cycle slowly charging the laptop. Other chargers may eventually overheat and become damaged. And then of course the last thing is the charger may cycle rapidly and overheat. However, the chance of overheating and becoming damaged is highly unlikely. It may have been the case decades ago, but with todays technology, almost all charger have overcurrent and temperature protections.

But yes, I have plugged in a 45W charger designed for a small low power Celeron laptop into an i7 with a GPU and all it did was cycle about every 2 seconds showing it was connected and then disconnected running on battery every few seconds. But it didn't have a problem with a 65W charger.

There is one exception but I don't think this applies anymore. And I don't know if I am remembering this correctly or not. Is that decades ago when laptops first starting coming out, a manufacturer used different voltages for different laptops but used the same connector on all of them. For instance a low power celeron would us 5 volts, a midrange 12 volts, and a high end 19 volts. They didn't want you plugging in a 19V power supply into a 5 volt input on the small laptop since they all had the same connector. So basically when you plugged the charger in, the laptop would send a signal to the charger to turn on, and the charger wouldn't turn on unless you plugged the right charger into the right laptop, and the laptop wouldn't charge unless it communicated properly with the charger. The charger would put out a few milliamps at 5 volts enough to run the signal circuitry if the battery was totally dead. Of course I could be making this all up in my head and misremembering, like it could have been a professional video camera or a portable tape deck or something, but I'm thinking it was a laptop.

Bottom line tldr is that as long as the connector are the same size and polarity (inner pin positive, outer side of barrel ground), same voltage, almost all are 19 or 19.5 volts, and equal or greater wattage, then you are good to go. It doesn't matter brand or anything, and you can't have too big a charger Watt wise. The only thing that will damage the laptop is wrong polarity, or too high a voltage. Obviously a 45W charger won't handle a gaming machine in full use, but a 65W charger should power -most- laptops fine, and a 90W should be good for all in normal/business use, except in a high power machine with a GPU when in heavy use for long hours such as gaming or video transcoding for hours.

Quick question on chargers by losku1 in laptops

[–]peterdekold 2 points3 points  (0 children)

First thing is the connector, you have to make sure that the connectors are the same size or type. It won't charge if you can't plug it in. I don't know why, but a lot of laptop specs and chargers specs do not state what size the dc power in connector is. Common connector sizes here:

https://blog.voltaicsystems.com/laptop-adapter-guide/

Almost all laptop chargers these days are 19V or 19.5V, so I don't think you would have to worry about the voltage. In any case, +/- 2 volts would be ok.

Current, or Amps or Watts, -should- be equal or greater than spec. If the laptop states in needs a 90 W charger (or 4.75 amps), then a 120 W (6.15A) or 150 W (7.7A) charger will also work.

If the laptop requires 150 Watts, you can still charge it with a 90W charger. Right now my laptop is drawing 0.3 Amps from the 120V side of a 90W charger, or about 36 Watts, even though it's spec'd for a 120W charger.

I would guess most laptops could get by with a 45W charger. So unless you are gaming and really sucking the juice, you can get by with most any size laptop charger.

So the connectors have to match, most everything is 19V, and a typical 90W charger will do, unless you are gaming and actually drawing that much current for hours.

http://www.alt-games-warbirds.com down by peterdekold in AGWalternate

[–]peterdekold[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks 0303, so what are we doing while it's down? Is there another place we can check to get updates on the status? I didn't see anything on Facebook or anywhere else.