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A weird power supply issue almost took out a whole batch of laptops I was fixing last month
I had six identical laptops from a small office in Toledo on my bench. I was using a generic 65W power brick I keep for testing, which had worked fine for months. Plugged in the third one, heard a pop, and saw a tiny puff of smoke from the charging port. Turns out that specific model has a weird voltage sense pin that the generic brick shorted. I had to replace the DC jack on three of them before I figured it out. Anyone else run into a problem with a certain brand's charging circuit being that picky?
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gavinb971mo ago
Man, that's rough. Actually, it's usually the other way around. A bad laptop can fry a power brick, not the brick killing the laptop. Those sense pins are just for data to check the charger's wattage. A short there shouldn't send power where it doesn't belong unless the laptop's own circuit was already faulty. I've seen it happen when liquid damage bridges the pins inside the port.
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xenaf511mo ago
Interesting point, Gavin. You're right about the sense pins, but what about a cheap third-party charger? I've seen knockoff bricks with bad wiring send a surge right through the data line. If the laptop's protection isn't perfect, that spike could sneak into a sensitive chip. It's not always the laptop's fault first. A faulty charger can absolutely be the trigger if it's poorly made.
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Check the sense pin wiring before plugging in, like gavinb97 said.
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