Can anyone diagnose this problem?
By firemom31
@firemom31 (598)
United States
May 14, 2011 12:46pm CST
A friend of mine has a Delstar netbook and her kid plugged the wrong charger into it (with higher voltage). It just shut down and now does nothing. I know this is bad, but do you think it's fixable?
3 responses
@RamRes (1723)
• Argentina
18 May 11
About diagnosis, I guess your kid blew up at least the power supply of the netbook. For sure, putting another charger with an higher voltage may cause severe damage to the inner components, but the exact extent of the problem greatly varies based on the affected parts.
In the best case, it only damaged the power supply and internal voltage regulators, maybe a protection just burns and replacing a fuse fixes the problem. Bad news is that laptops don't have a good dedicated power supply like desktops, and therefore have often less electrical protections. Most likely the over-voltage jumped to the motherboard, in which case it may have affected only a few components, or maybe it destroyed the CPU altogether (and if that's the case, say goodbye to your PC). Maybe it can affect the battery too, or the hard disk/CD drive.
It greatly depends on your exact case, but you should ask a technician of the laptop manufacturer to see what happens and how fixable is it.
@firemom31 (598)
• United States
18 May 11
I told my friend her laptop is probably toast, now if I can just get her to accept that fact! Thanks for your reply.
@firemom31 (598)
• United States
14 May 11
I was hoping for something inexpensive, I don't think her laptop is worth much even new, but I'm sure you're right. Thanks.
@leonsan (49)
•
19 May 11
Very probably he/she fried the power transformer, hopefully it didn't get to the motherboard or any other good stuff. That'd be my bet without looking anyway. I'm not being weird or anything L0L, but how does it smell? Burnt out electrics have an acrid plasticy smell to them. Wish them good luck from me :)
