Dell 90 watt power supply

[lonewolf]

I have a older dell xps laptop with the standard 90w power supply. Today it quit charging. After a few checks a wire inside the strain relief seems to have failed. Not a problem I will just shorten the cord and re solder the wires. I pulled the sticker off the back to see if there were any hidden screws to remove. There are none to remove, does not seem to be any snap clips either is there something I am missing or did they glue the halves of this thing together? Or worse yet is it potted after the case is assembled.

[bad_brain]

hm, usually there are some kind of clips inside, but the kind that is not made for being opened again. so they have to be opened with force and usually break when doing so.....I doubt the halves are glued together because it would mean an extra production step and extra material (the glue), and companies of course save every cent where possible.

[lonewolf]

Thanks,
I'll have to play with it and see if I can get it apart nicely in the next day or two. If I find a non destructive and easy way I will point it out. I just can not see throwing away a perfectly good power supply because of a broken wire.

[lonewolf]

For what it is worth the power supply is glued together. I finally managed to get some time to get it apart. However it is not glued all that well. if you cut it at one of the corners and pry carefully it will come apart nicely. also the shield is soldered to a capacitor, before pulling the shield off desolder it from the cap. After that repair is quite nice. I was unable because of the design to add a couple of standoffs and screw the pieces together, not enough room in the case for this. But gluing it back together in a few spots does work well.

[bad_brain]

cheap bastards, all for the sake of "can't be repaired, buy a new one!"....
good work with fixing it...

in the long run you might want to look for an universal power supply in your friendly next door electronics shop. I go this one a while ago and I am really happy with it, comes with all kinds of different plugs, you can set the output and input voltage and the output polarity:

[DNR]

yea a lot of this stuff is remove and replace. I now toss my Dell vista laptop to the junk pile, battery no longer holds a charge, 1 broken USB port. It was just cheaper to buy two new laptops today than replace any of those parts. I remember when all laptops were around $2,000 each...

DNR