Questions on AC adapters

[pcnoob]

Is it okay to use an ac adaptor with 16V 3.7A on a laptop that requires 16V 4.0A? I use a 4.5A on my x21 which need 3.5A and it's okay so far but I don't know about the other way around so any help will be appreciated. Thanks.

[Gee]

It will be fine. Nothing to worry about.

[brainpicker]

It will be fine. Nothing to worry about.

Possibly. But don't try charging your battery AND using the laptop at the same time! That puts the most stress on the A/C adapter and the power supply thus it would likely cause problems. The A/C adapter could get hot enough to start a fire, and stress to the power supply might be too great. Companies manufacture and recommend proper A/C adapters for a reason,

I live in Florida where my power is seldom "right on". When I ran desktops and workstations years ago I wondered why my friends and I were replacing quality power supplys with regularity. Even UPS units don't last long here as the switching curcuitry works way too hard. It wasn't until I bought an expensive UPS where I could watch my household power that I saw what was happening. Much of the time my voltage was too LOW, which before purchasing the high-quality voltage-regualting type UPS units was putting too much stress on the desktop power supply. This in turn not only caused the power supply to die much too early, but the excess heat caused problems with other parts. It became a game of economy where I could widen the voltage range on the UPS to prevent switching every few minutes at times during each day (and all that work caused the UPS to die before it's time), but then that would cause the power supply to die faster. One would think it's a no-brainer... save the $500 UPS unit and replace the $75 power supply every six-eight months instead, BUT, those of you who ever spent time diagnosing this type of issue know how hard it is to really determine it IS the power supply that is bad. So the time saved might be more than enough to sway one the other way. It sucked.

Now I use laptops at home with an UPS and a separate voltage regulator before my A/C adapter and the battery in my laptop and knock on formica I've not had an issue. Otherwise, I use battery alone.

In other words... buy a proper A/C adapter. My goodness, TSelling has some here for $20 in the Marketplace area.

- Yak

[Gee]

We are talking about a difference of 300 miliamps.

Assuming his power is clean, he should not have a problem. Even with a proper power supply, it will not be safe, if you have spikes or uneven voltage.