Duracell is now a registered trademark of Procter & Gamble. While Duracell is branded on this adapter, this is not a Duracell product per se. It is actually manufactured under license by Battery-Biz. The company supplies the majority of Duracell's product-specific batteries and power products, such as car inverters. If your product has "Duracell" plastered on it, but it isn't a watch, AAA, AA, C, D, or 9 V battery, there's a good chance Battery-Biz makes it.
This charging kit covers the three basic modes of travel: the air, in a car, and when you have an AC outlet handy. It also happens to be one of two universal adapters sold under the Duracell brand. Covering that trio of bases costs about $90, which is about $20 more than the 90 W model with the cigarette lighter receptacle plug on its own. There's also a 40 W adapter, but that's specifically for netbooks.
The adapter includes Velcro strips for cable management, but you're going to end up with a corded mess one way or the other. The cables that connect to the power adapters aren't angled, making them difficult to pack away. And although this is one of the few adapters that actually includes an EmPower plug, there is a very faint high-frequency squeal that emanates from the adapter when it's used with certain 16 V notebooks.
While Duracell backs this up with a three-year warranty, nobody likes dealing with the RMA process for silly manufacturing deficiencies. The problem seems to disappear when we use the adapter with 19 V notebooks, so the problem could be related to the sense resistors responsible for lowering the voltage.
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That seems unusual. In my house we have 3 different laptops spanning 6 year purchase dates and they all have the exact same plug. Two of the laptops are Latitudes and the other is a Studio XPS. The only difference is that the Studio XPS came with a 130 watt adapter as opposed to 65 watt adapters for the Latitudes. So no gaming with that machine while plugged into the 65 watt adapters.
Actually this sort of standard DOES exist in Europe for smart phones and cell phones, I'm not sure if it includes laptop or netbooks but it might. I'll have to search around.
It seems the bottom line today is buy the OEM adapters if you want to play it safe.
come on Toms, get the BD benchies out already.
So that $800 laptop then requires another $270 to run after 3 years? And this is assuming you don't drop the thing, or break it through normal wear and tear. And laptops do not age as gracefully as desktops because they are generally crap hardware to begin with. Much better to stick with a $300 laptop, and a decent desktop. The desktop will keep up with the times longer and will have less maintenance, while the laptop can be swapped out when need be.
Instead of buying a new Lithium-Ion batt (that would only last about another 2 years anyway), I just use a 12V 7.2Ah Lead Acid connected to the PSU input when I don't have access to a mains supply for an extended period (e.g. on long train journey).
It works cos the PSU output voltage is 15V so 12V is close enough.
cheers!
Phones and GPS devices take less current to charge than notebook batteries. These devices are moving from proprietary chargers to charging via USB. I haven't met a notebook computer yet that could charge off the low USB currents, even if the 5V supply could be pushed up to 12V.
I hope that that is so; it certainly wasn't the last time that I looked at this in detail. At that time, just putting 15V across the charging terminals of the battery and going to sleep would ruin the battery; there was all kinds of logic in the charger to protect the battery.
Have they really built this into the batter now, so that all we have to do is provide a DC source with the right voltage and no other control circuitry?