How to find the right ac adapter for your laptop

Your laptop’s ac adapter’s cord got chewed up by your dog? Want another one at your office instead of have to carry it around everyday? Or it’s simply quit working? There are lots of reasons for people buying a replacement ac adapter. Being a seller special in laptop ac adapter, we sold hundreds of them everyday. And we see lot of our customer buy the wrong one (In fact,, 70% of our returns are not defective, the customer just bought the wrong one). So how do you choose the right ac adapter for your laptop?

The easiest way is to go to your laptop manufacture’s website. Most time they will have it for sell, unless your laptop is a really old model. The only problem with this method is the price tag. The laptop manufacture will charge an arm and a leg for the charger ( $80-$200), compare to the none-OEM charger which only cost around $20-$40.

If you don’t want to break the bank when you need a ac adapter, try to google the ac adapter’s part #, which can be easily found on the back of your ac adapter (picture A). Most time you will find someone sell a third-party-made online for very reasonable price. If you can’t find it online by part #, don’t worry, the right adapter is till out there, you just need to know what you are really looking for and little help from what you have learned in high school physical classes. (what?? You got an F on it? Shame on you!)

There are three most important things to determine if an ac adapter will work with your laptop or not: Voltage, Current (Amp), and the connector size.

The first two are the easy ones. Look at your old adapter, it will tell you all those information. The most important is the voltage; you do NOT want something different too much with your old ac adapter otherwise it will fry your laptop (+/- 0.5 Volt should be OK, as most laptop can tolerate small difference). Don’t worry about the current (Amp) too much, just make sure it’s equal or greater than your old one. (For those who want to know. The power current is controlled by the laptop, not by the adapter. So if a ac adapter have 6.5Amp on the label, it means that it CAN provide current up to 6.5A.)

The hardest part of find the right ac adapter would be the connectors which plug into your laptop. The diameter of those connector is measured by mm, so it’s really hard to tell the difference just by look at a picture on the web. Lucky the sizes are standard, there are only around 12 sizes, the most used one are 5.5mm x 2.5mm, and 4.8mm x 1.7mm. If you are not sure, you can send us a email, we will look it up for you.