Laptop chargers are subjected to pretty brutal conditions

[Torn Mind]

I mean, while enclosed in a plastic box, the chargers for many laptops have to function while being rated to deliver power up to the equivalent to an old incandescent at the very least. Not to mention, the usage scenario in which the battery is run down and the user is using the laptop heavily at the same time really pulls the power and they get really hot. The glue on paper bubbles up at times.

But alas, they survive many of these cycles. The wires tend to break before the unit itself if the portable device is actually transported and not parked at a desk.

I think I may have compromised the laptop charger for the picked-up-from-someone's-trash after putting it through the condition of charging the battery and using the unit at the same time. Monitor brightness oscillates and there is a small electrical noise when the unit is really hot. But not present when the laptop is fully charged and hence the charger doesn't have to provide full load.

 

[VirtualLarry]

I would have thought that the AC adapter / charger, powering the laptop during use, and charging the battery with whatever power budget was left from the adapter and not used by the laptop during usage, was working as expected.

I don't expect that the adapter would be damaged in any way by that, unless something else was defective. Maybe that's why the laptop was discarded, someone was afraid of a fire.

 

[Torn Mind]

No, the laptop is in perfect functioning condition, and it has the original, not a generic, battery. They moved, and left behind other trash. Battery-powered hedge trimmer, old printers, old cordless drill, lights. Basically, any tool with a shot battery or no battery and too old to be worth putting in the UHaul truck. Now, whether that was eviction or voluntary is another matter, but w/e.

I took a multimeter, and checked the AC voltage. 0.5 - 1 volt of AC. The Hz reading reads 60, which doesn't happen if the PSU is properly filtering things. Only when the battery is fully charged does the monitor not flicker and make that tiny "chirpy" electrical noise. Perhaps I just pushed the charger over its edge. After all it is 7 years old and who knows how many of those cycles it went through. I didn't take measurements before the symptoms of it being compromised occurred.

Most users don't baby a laptop. If the battery is run down, it's just plug the charger in and keep on rollin'. I know I did that plenty of times myself and the charger gets quite hot. If I didn't break it, someone else would have.

The PSU did "pop" when inserting the AC cord into it when I first used it, so it sure wasn't in tip top shape. I also feel play when gently rocking the AC cord.

The PSU was made by Delta Electronics, who is alledgedly reliable at worst and up to top of the line if the customer demands it (OklahomaWolf at JonnyGURU tends to sing praises about their build quality). 6-7 years of hard use could have done it in, and I just gave one last cycle before noticeable signs of failure manifested itself. This laptop didn't have great battery life even when new. It is only a 65 watt unit, and perhaps a little cost cutting by Acer was done here. Or maybe it just needs new filtering capacitors because the old ones are getting dry.

Amazingly, the system is still stable if the battery is in a fully charged state. The ripple or AC voltage only reaches severity when the load gets "heavier" and the unit heats up.

 

[Valantar]

From my experience, laptop chargers fail quite frequently. More often than laptops, at least. There's a reason there's a market for thrid-party laptop chargers, after all.

I'd also think it's the combination of heat and being tossed around that kills them. I've seen many a laptop charger smack into the floor in a library, classroom or study hall. And they do tend to get toasty when in use. OTOH, adding active cooling to a brick like this would be a nightmare (dust intrusion would be a big problem due to bing stuffed into bags and whatnot, and tiny fans would be noisy as all hell). Not to mention people blocking the air intakes/exhaust by having the charger on a bed, a thick carpet, or some other nightmarish place. Making the casing out of metal for better thermal transfer would constitute a significant shock hazard, so that's out of the question. I guess the best safeguard you can have is making an inner heatsink casing that leads the heat out to just inside the plastic skin, while using 105-degree capacitors.

Then again, there are decent standards in place for these, both in terms of security and efficiency (which helps keep heat in check). My laptop charger is 5 years old, and while it hasn't seen that much physical abuse, it's been running 24/7 for extended periods, with no sign of giving up. It's a ThinkPad charger, though, so it ought to be nearly indestructible. The PC sure is.

 

[Torn Mind]

They do fail, yes, but my experience has been moreso with the wires themselves, not the innards, breaking. In the case of Dell's D810 charger, their godforsaken signal wire crapping out and rendering the unit unable to charge even though the insides would be able to keep on chugging. Or the Surface Pro 2's charger wire failing where it comes out of the brick. Perhaps the 65w rating PSU is not as well built as Acer's 90w ones.

But yeah, charging up a battery from near 0% while computing full blast and at a bright monitor setting is gonna speed up wear.