My main computer is a Lenovo brand laptop which is going to turn 4 years old in a few months. What happened to me is that the other day, the power supply suddenly stopped working, the computer still worked, but I only had one single battery charge left (which is about 1h-1h30).
I can't know how exactly it broke down, but some measurement made me see that it only provided 14V instead of 20V.
The power supply is a brick which is absolutely unoppenable (without using an axe, which in this case it would be only openable once), so I have no chance to ever open it and fix something that is wrong in it (despite being probably able to). Of course it was made in China, like all things that break down suddenly like this.
As if this was not enough this happened 1 day after my start on a new job (where I have to use my own PC for the job 'cause they don't have enough of them).
Thankfully some colleague at my new job had a similar power supply (but a less powerful one, for a smaller computer), and measurement on this supply confirmed that it was effectively supposed to give 20V, not 14 (this was expected, but a confirmation is nice).
Another colleague of my dad had a power supply of a Dell PC which he didn't need any longer (the PC was too old I belive) for free, and gave it to my dad, and I was able to cut the cords and connect them together to get it working with my PC just fine ! Not only that, but now I have a much longer cord on the power supply (since the length of both cords adds up
).There is nothing much impressive in this story but I learned something very important :
1) Hardware can fail anytime even when not expected (especially if it was made in China)
2) It is amazing how much helpful it is to have a job related to electricity, can save you loads of bucks and trouble. Someone who knowns nothing about electricity would probably have to buy a new power supply, or maybe even a new PC if they don't make the same models of supplies anymore or if they are not skilled enough to tell that the problem is the supply.
3) The life time of some device which owns a rechargeable battery is limited to the life time of it's power supply !
If the power supply fails, one last battery charge and your device is bricked, even if it is electronically fully functional.
This applies to PC, but also GBA, DS, cellphones, tablets, electric vehicles, etc, etc.... With the ever increasing amount of electronic things which relies on batteries, this is going to be a real problem. I never realized it until now.
