portable, [OT] Buy a S.A.I. for a laptop ?

One of my friend have the worst luck, and his computer burned due a temporally
high voltage from the electric company.

I am afraid of the posibility that something similar happen to my laptop.
Does the ac power adaptor of my laptop *protect* from this kind of accidents?
I mean, the ac adaptor will be burned, but my laptop will survive ?

Thanks in advance. Bye
--
Ricardo Catalinas Jimenez Madrid, Spain.
th1nk3r(at)server01(dot)org XXXX@XXXXX.COM
My gpg public key at: http://www.server01.org/pubkey

While the adapter may get damaged, don't count on it protecting the
computer. If you're worried about such things, you can get protection
devices (forget the cheap ones). Incidentally, if the electric company
damaged the computer, they should be paying for a replacement.

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I would agree, however from what I have read that laptops usually power
straight off the battery and this helps protect them to some degree from
spikes. I would of course not bet my life on it, however power spikes are
pretty rare both here in London and in my old village out in the
sticks.....probably have jinked myself now :-/

I think this probably depends on what country you are in and 'spikes' are
usually not covered; mainly as this would have a tendency to eat into fatcat
paycheques, its probably home insurance only or nothing.

On a related note of compensation from the electric company, complete
incompetence and Cluelessness(tm) is covered where I am from. Locally a
village near to mine was having rather heafty maintainence work done on its
local sub-station; so important the electic company sent a letter weeks in
advance informing everyone there will be an outage of a couple of minutes and
then everyone will be moved onto a huge generator which would keep them going
the rest of the weekend.

The day arrives, said outage occurs and then everyone is moved over. All
house equipment starts burning in the whole village, magic blue smoke
everywhere. This lasted a couple of hours until the company realised that
they had hooked everyone up to a 480V source (here in the UK we are normally
240V@50hz officially)! This they compensated everyone for and new fridges
all round.

Chee.r....r........<fszzzt BANG>......no carrier.


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Spikes caused by switching on motors etc., your problem. If caused by
equipment failure or maintenance error, such as the one you mentioned,
they're responsible.

Incidentally, my computers are plugged into a UPS. The company that made
the UPS, will pay for any damage caused by power surges.


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Where do you live? Laptop adapters are designed to be used all over the
world which means that they can handle a range of 110V to 240V (actually
it's wider, more like 90V to 260V so they can work in a brownout in the US
and normal overvoltage in the UK). I you live in a 110V country then you
have a huge margin for overvoltage, if you live in a 220V or 240V country
then you don't. The spike protectors in powerstrips will handle short
duration transients, not lightning strikes or prolonged overvoltage
conditions. The circuit breakers in your house are designed to trip from
an over current situation which will keep you house from burning down but
won't protect any electric equiptment. Your best bet is a good UPS which
will uncouple from the line if there is a severe overvoltage.

It should be OK but it depends on the adapter. The adapter converts the AC
to raw DC and this is switched on and off to produce the working
voltage(s) for the computer. In many cases where lightning isn't the
culprit you might be OK getting an new adapter because the voltage can not
punch through the transformer or jump across the board to damage it.


If you can charge up the battery on someone else's laptop and the laptop
works then you might be safe in using their adapter to test your laptop.
Be advise that if your laptop was slightly damaged it can damage an
adapter plugged into it.